Fwiw the finger contortions needed by eMacs were also giving me RSIs - other than cutting my computer use (basically don’t spend every waking moment typing) I switched to vim since I figured its modal nature would require fewer multi-finger combos. I’ve been mostly free of issues for over 15 years now.

I switched from vim, to emacs evil, to vanilla emacs, had pain, bought a keyboard with a thumb cluster, been good ever since.

Keyboards with thumb clusters are definitely the best option, but in my experience, even on a normal keyboard, simply remapping your keys makes a world of difference.

Here are some of my most useful remaps:

- Swap enter and semicolon. Enter is one of my most used keys. It should be "directly accessible"

- Make right command backspace. Backspace is another key I very commonly use, but it's far away and causes a lot of pain. Now, it's right under my thumb! (Regular backspace key is now forward delete).

- Make caps lock and enter control. (When pressed with other keys). This is useful for Emacs commands.

- Caps lock is escape when not pressed with other keys.

- Enter is semicolon when not pressed with other keys.

I use Karabiner for Mac to do my remappings.

The "when not pressed with other keys" stuff is interesting. I never thought about that. The only trouble I can see with this is being unable to type effectively on a normie keyboard. I've had the ctrl/caps swap for years and I regular mess it up on a normie keyboard, although it's no big deal to accidentally press caps, of course. What I like is my portable mechanical keyboard has a physical switch, so it works whatever computer I plug it in to.

What keyboard do you use?

Even though, as I wrote above, Emacs does not require finger contortions, I do do finger contortions. I doubt I'll ever stop using Emacs but I have always been a little concerned about my little fingers ("pinkies"). So the options seem to be either evil mode, or a new keyboard, both of which require busting a decade's worth of muscle memory...

Emacs does not require finger contortions. You can use M-x commands (like VS Code), or use evil (like vim).

Escape-meta-alt-control-shift :)

I make it a point to always press the modifier key with my other hand to reduce finger contortions. For pressing multiple modifiers, I take my hand off of home row to avoid using my pinky. (I also use a ortho-linear mechanical keyboard with thumb clusters and a Colemak-DH layout.)

Fair enough, but doesn't cursorless use LSP?

Quite a while ago I remember talk about making the LSP server work for other editors by avoiding importing vscode.

Afaik that's in-progress, and the goal is support for other editors, but it's not there yet. Vanilla talon (what cursorless is built on) works fine everywhere though! (You just don't get the AST transforms.)