Using your palms to press the ctrl keys is only seriously possible on some curved keyboards. Everyone else, who prefers to touch keys with their fingers, like they were meant to, is going to do the sensible stuff and put the more frequently used modifier in the more easily-reachable place.

All this press-ctrl-with-your-palms fad is a problem solved in the wrong place.

And I have to say I dislike the tone of that page, too:

> Swapped but never had a problem [...] > Because you don't actually type that much.

Right.

> All this press-ctrl-with-your-palms fad is a problem solved in the wrong place.

Total agreement from me, I consign this piece of advice to the same trash pile as !!NEVER USE ARROW KEYS!! ... cargo-culting nonsense.

> Using your palms to press the ctrl keys is only seriously possible on some curved keyboards.

It feels fine to me on my flat keyboard with low-profile keys.

I used to use my pinky to press ctrl. Then I briefly remapped to caps-lock, but that felt awkward to use together with the shift key (but I didn't use it enough to get truly used to it). Then I switched to using my palm, and then finally to using god-mode which means that I don't have to use modifier keys as much anymore (though I still use it sometimes, and I still press ctrl just as much in non-emacs applications like terminals and Firefox).

A keyboard with symmetrically placed C and M keys is another piece of Xah Lee's sound advice: http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_pinky.html

I've been using the MicroSoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 for several years and it has improved my touch for M and C. Recently, I've been applying that on my ThinkPad [chosen because of the symmetric layout] and am removing some additional bad habits related to left-C right-C.

I've seen these arguments before, but find them very unconvincing. I've no idea how I'm supposed to comfortably press ctrl with my palm, the issues with 'now hotkeys are in bad places' are resolved by just not having capslock at all (although I don't actually have any difficulty pressing anything either way), and the pinky load/awkwardness just doesn't seem that important to me, I don't think the keyboard is particularly well calibrated to use the pinkys appropriately anyway.

I'm happy for some people to find these things important and type differently, but what is the evidence that it is actively wrong to bind caps-lock as ctrl?

Edit: There are a lot of good points in these pages and I appreciate that the author has made many customisations in pursuit of an ideal layout, and the principle of sharing load between hands equally is a good one. It's just that I'm quite unconvinced that having capslock act as ctrl is a terrible thing, especially compared to many other changes that can be made even on a normal keyboard layout.

Palm/ctrl won't work on most laptops, especially since nearly all of them have chiclet keys these days.. heck, more and more desktop keyboards do too.

Remapping capslock to ctrl on all my machines turned out to be one of the best things I have ever done. It helps me with far more than emacs.

Also, Ctrl+j works as 'enter' as well.

A decent subset of emacs keybindings work in anything that uses gnu readline or similar library (ctrl+a|b|f... etc).