Training Wheels For Better Ergonomics

1. Background

In my previous article Ergonomics Using xcape I described my setup to minimize chording in Emacs. The setup is working whell, and in the few weeks of usage, I've reduce the xcape timeout setting from 250ms to 170ms, this is the timeout that controls the behavior of modifier keys in xcape.

2. Training Wheels In Emacs

Next, I decided that getting some feedback from Emacs and Emacspeak when xcape behavior is triggered would act as training wheels while getting used to the setup.

I considered the following:

1. Adding a feature to xcape that produces a sound cue on triggering modified behavior — would work everywhere in X.
2. Having Emacs produce some feedback when xcape behavior is triggered.
3. Asked on emacs-devel as to how one would do this in Emacsand was pointed at echo-keystrokes by one of the core Emacs maintainers.

3. Solution

I phrased my question on emacs-devel as is there an elisp hook for implementing this. Turns out no new code is needed; Emacs has a echo-keystrokes custom option that controls how long Emacs waits before displaying an incomplete key-sequence.

So now, I have echo-keystrokes set to 0.05 — and Emacspeak speaks the resulting incomplete keystroke that is displayed by Emacs.

Still playing with various values of echo-keystrokes but that is easy — it's just one custom setting.

4. Conclusion

To quote Larry Wall of Perl fame,

Lazy programmer equals good programmer!