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.)