This may be 90% cargo culting, 10% reality. One of my former co-workers desperately wanted to be perceived as an Excel ninja, and had heard that people who had achieved guru-level Excel mastery would remove their F1 keys, and so one day pried off her F1 key. Meanwhile the person in our office who probably could have written Minecraft in Excel and then built an Excel simulator in Excel Minecraft had a keyboard with a conspicuously intact F1 key.
Same thing happens in programming circles. I am not exempt: All my MacBook keyboards get their caps lock keys remapped to control, in honor of my Apple II childhood and SunOS pizza box college heritage.
i also remap caps -> ctrl, but have bindings for `fj` & `jf` in insert mode to exit back to normal mode, on the theory that you basically never have to type either of those letter combos (it has come up maybe twice in the five years i've had it set up). and even if you do have to type one of those letter combos, all you have to do is wait for ~half second between keystrokes and it works fine.
Ideally, yes. I don't recall all the details -- I typically run fairly lightweight in terms of vim customizations as I'm often multiple SSH sessions deep, sometimes on systems with vi but no vim (they exist!), so automatic pastetoggle is usually off the table regardless.
This is spot on. My comment on this thread tried to give some background on how the cargo cult part. The experienced Excel users I know also keep the F1 key right on the keyboard and remap it.
well, emacs, or terminal usage in general on a mac with the control key not on edge of keyboard is extremely unergonomic. So yay to control in the right place.
I'm with you; you're talking to a more than twenty-five year user of Emacs here. I do try, however, to be no less circumspect of my own actions than I am of others'.
Is saving my pinkie from cramping worth losing the ability to type on anyone else's keyboard? I'd say so, but there is a cost.
Same thing happens in programming circles. I am not exempt: All my MacBook keyboards get their caps lock keys remapped to control, in honor of my Apple II childhood and SunOS pizza box college heritage.