Unfinished sentence: if you foresee frequent "Ctrl-Alt-" combinations,
it might be easier to learn or teach just always doing "ESC" instead of
"Alt-", rather than doing "Alt-" for 2-key and but doing "ESC Ctrl-" to
avoid the 3-key.
Neil Van Dyke wrote at 07/15/2011 12:36 AM:
Eli Barzilay wrote at 07/14/2011 10:38 AM:
9 hours ago, John Clements wrote:
First thing: you can use ESC-(. That is: press and release ESC, type
(. That works, but it's a big pain.
Use Alt-( -- much less pain. (And that works in Emacs regardless of
paredit, BTW.)
On a tangent, but an important one:
1. Text editors that involve Alt- combinations a lot should also
support ESC.
2. People should be warned that the "ESC (" (two keypresses) might be
*a lot* easier on their hands than "Alt-(" (multi-key combinations).
3. Other things you can do to make typing easier on the hands might be
good, though there are tradeoffs.
The reason has to do with the stress of stretching/twisting people do
with their hands for multi-key combination, is my layperson's
understanding. Around the time, when CTS and other RSIs were getting
a lot of attention, I heard this from multiple credible sources, and
the knowledge seemed to work for me.
Now, you can avoid the stretching by using alternate hands for this
two-key combination, if you have two Alt keys. But the
alternate-hands approach doesn't avoid stretching when you get a
Ctrl-Alt combination, which happens a lot in, say, Emacs. So, if you
forsee frequent Ctrl-Alt combinations
I had hand pain from typing, circa 1990, but I made a few changes,
like switching to use ESC in Emacs. Something in those changes solved
the problem, and years later I can still type heavily without difficulty.
Back then, I was on a project team that had two people injure their
hands from typing, to the point that they were advised not to type *at
all* or they would lose all use of their hands. We hired typists for
them, and eventually they had to change careers. Most of the rest of
the team had wrist braces by the end. It happens; we weren't really
designed to sit down and press little squares a hundred times per
minute, all day.
--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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