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> You are meant to press Ctrl with your right hand when you press C-x. Nothing's stopping you from doing it that way, but since Steele and Moon started writing
by xenophonf 3y ago
> You are meant to press Ctrl with your right hand when you press C-x.
Nothing's stopping you from doing it that way, but since Steele and Moon started writing EMACS in 1976 on the PDP-6 and the PDP-10 and probably used VT52 terminals to access those systems, you're probably expected to have a control key on the home row to the left of the caps lock. The VT52 does not have a control key on the right side of the keyboard. I've found that Emacs's ergonomics are greatly improved by swapping the caps lock and left control keys on modern, IBM Model M-inspired keyboard layouts.
- crabbone 3y agoI believe this was / is still believed to be the "best historical keyboard" to be used with Emacs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard#/media/File:Space-cadet.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard#/media/Fi... it has Ctrl on both sides. Even if the 76's Emacs wasn't designed for it, most people with decades of Emacs experience would start salivating just from looking at this keyboard. I believe, that when anyone using Emacs is designing key bindings, be it today, ten or twenty years ago -- they think about something like Space Cadet.