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Do what you like to do (thelemmy.club)
submitted 18 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 16 hours ago (7 children)

The trick with emacs is to get a keyboard where you can press CTRL with your palm instead of fingers. I've been really doing it until I switched to zed.

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  • [–] 10 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (3 children)

    Just swap Left Control and Caps Lock.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

    Many Unix workstations (and also home computers like the Amiga) keyboards placed the Ctrl key to the left of the letter A, and the β‡ͺ Caps Lock key in the bottom left.

    The problem is that Control on PC keyboards is in a place where it's really uncomfortable to use on a very frequent basis. Giving Caps Lock, which virtually nobody uses terribly heavily, that prime piece of real estate is just nuts.

    On Debian Linux, that's:

    /etc/default/keyboard:

    XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:swapcaps"

    And:

    # dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
# service keyboard-setup restart

    That'll handle the Linux console and X11/Wayland. Only place you'll ever see Control in its PC location then is in the bootloader and BIOS.

    That'll also cover laptop internal keyboards or something like that, where you are gonna have limited options for hardware alternatives and can't use exotic keyboards.

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  • [–] 4 points 16 hours ago* (1 child)

    The position of Caps Lock is because on mechanical typewriters, the shift lock key physically held down Shift using a push-to-toggle mechanism. (Windows' default German layout still does that! "German extended (E1)" and "German (IBM)", aka DIN T1, don't.)

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  • [–] 1 point 15 hours ago

    Hmm. Left Control is still adjacent to Shift, though.

    searches

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Corona

    This 1930s US Army typewriter has a Shift Lock, but it's up where 1 is today, not adjacent to Shift. I don't think that it's essential, even with a mechanical coupling, to have them adjacent.

    thinks

    I mean, I'd think that unless maybe you have one of those electric typewriters with an LCD display, there isn't a Control key at all, so I totally get giving the slot to Caps Lock on a typewriter then.

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  • [–] 2 points 16 hours ago

    For people that type a lot using Level 3 (e.g. using the QWERTZ layout), AltGr on Caps is probably more important. On NixOS, it's set with two options:

    {
  services.xserver.xkb.options = "lv3:caps_switch_capslock_with_ctrl";
  console.useXkbConfig = true;
}

    The kernel console REALLY doesn't like E1 putting the lv5 switch on <M-f>, and instead deletes the f key, so don't use the second option if your layout does that. (Just try it out and don't gc until you've verified all keys work.)

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