Enhance Emacs Ergonomics Under X: Happy Hands!

1. Executive Summary

Describes customizations under X that makes my hands happier. Leverages features and (mis-features) of modern-day laptops to break old habits and reduce chording in common cases.

2. Background

I have been using Emacs for 33 years now and at this point, much of my Emacs usage is based on muscle memory. This has its good and bad points; the good ones are obvious; I dont need to think about what keys I press. But it also has some downside; I likely press more keys than I ought to for a given result.

1. I learn to use Emacs on a TTY (text console) and all my habits are driven by the keys available on a terminal.
2. Under X you have more keys available, but I resisted running X until around 2008.
3. Now, I almost never run Emacs on a TTY, except when I need to rescue a broken X setup.
4. after turning caps_lock to Control I forgot about the other modifier keys; I press Escape for Meta.
5. I also defined C-; and friends as additional Emacs prefix keys.
6. The above saves your hands because you dont chord using the modifier keys on the bottom row.
7. But you waste 6 modifier keys on a laptop where keys are in short supply.

3. Leveraging Current Keyboard

• The motivation to leverage the laptop keyboard is higher now, since with the arrival of the pandemic, that has been my primary (only) machine.
• I can chord without thinking using the modified caps_lock as Control. But I also noticed that I choard a lot.
• Chords I use most often as a prefix:
  • C-e — Emacspeak prefix,
  • C-s and C-r — Isearch,
  • C-c and C-x — emacs command prefix.
• Looking at the bottom row of the laptop keyboard, there are three modifier keys to either side of the spacebar.
• Adding the left and right Shift modifiers gives 8 keys that could do something useful when not used as a modifier key.

4. XCAPE: Turn Modifiers Into Buttons

I discovered xcape a while ago, but had set it aside for future exploration; The observations made in the previous section indicated that that time was now!

So here is my xcape Setup and associated XModmap as of the time of writing:

4.1. What This Does:

1. Control by itself sends C-e,
2. Super by itself sends C-c,
3. Alt by itself sends C-x,
4. Shift_l by itself sends C-s,
5. Shift_R by itself sends C-r.

Note that the XModmap file does the work of changing the <print> key on my laptop to be Super_L for symmetry. So the bottom row of keys now look like this:

Modifier	Control	Super	Alt	Spacebar	Alt	Super	Control
Key	C-e	C-c	C-x	Spacebar	C-x	C-c	C-e

Looking at the above, it's tempting to turn the SpaceBar into a modifier — but I've resisted doing that for now.

5. Observations

1. A week later, I'm slowly retraining my muscle memory — I use the new affordances described here about 25% of the time.
2. I find myself using the new features in the second half of the day when my hands are more tired.
3. The effect of thinking before pressing a key reminds me of the time I learn to use dvorak for text input; I still do so sometimes to give my hands a break.
4. The new mappings give some surprizing results e.g., alt shift saves the buffer, but buyer beware, alt super quits Emacs.
5. Am sure more muscle memory will emerge for oft-repeated tasks.