Neither Emacs nor the control/meta keys were invented on Lisp Machines. Emacs was written in TECO on DEC's PDP machines.<p>The control/meta keys actually date back to Professor Wirth at Stanford. The Stanford keyboard had control/meta then. MIT then had it in the form of the Knight keyboard.<p><a href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/hackdict/split/bucky_bits.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lysator.liu.se/hackdict/split/bucky_bits.html</a>
Interesting to see the Symbolics keyboard. As an Emacs user I had reprogrammed my ThinkPad keyboard (Windows) so that<p>Alt -> Control<p>Windows-key and Menu Key -> Alt<p>Control keys -> Windows key<p>So without having ever seen a Symbolics keyboard and without knowing the history behind emacs keyboard layout I remapped my keyboard so that I had very quick access to Control and Alt (= Meta) keys.<p>On my Macbook it's not that easy. I could remap the Command key to become a Control key, but many Mac shortcuts heavily rely on the Command key. So that's no option.
Emacs user? Get a Japanese keyboard.<p>That's my number one piece of advice after two decades of Emacsing and one on a Japanese keyboard.<p>Japanese keyboards have a much shorter space bar with extra keys on either side. Remap these to control, hit them with your thumbs, and experience bliss.<p>I used to get 'Emacs pinky' quite frequently, but never since the switch. If you think about it, it makes all kinds of sense:<p>- your thumbs are strong and dextrous but totally underused in a traditional layout
- most space bars are ridiculously large.. wasted real estate
- your non-spacebar thumb can comfortably rest on a ctrl key so there's often no lateral movement at all<p>Fascinating to see others thinking along the same lines as me with keyboard remapping, and also to discover that all this time we've been trying to get closer to the keyboards of antiquity!
Vi is a poor implementation of a great idea.<p>I would really like a modal editor in which I could configure the behavior for each key, maybe even define more modes and composable functions.
what is the difference between "backspace" and "rubout"? the emacs keyboard had both it seems, but wouldn't they be doing the same operation?
I never understood appeal of wasd. Maybe my fingers are shorter. It's way easier for me to have all three on same line so I change S to fwd and X to back.