Being left handed, I slightly disagree about your left hand (I'm left handed most of the time :) however the stress of repetive movements is often overlooked.
15 years ago, I started to use my left hand to control the mouse. My trunk had started leaning toward the right after a few years of using my right hand to control it, I had to compensate. No ,I did not verify recently if my trunk was now bending toward the left :) I use Eclipse these days, having used Emacs heavily in the 80's but got dragged toward Eclipse (Java side effect ?). I will eventually get back to it but reading your comment made me realize that I should wait when I can find emacs support for pedals much like an organ or a piano :) Luc P. > Here's a key Emacs tip that will reduce your stress and make the key > combinations easier, but it may not be obvious when you're first starting > out... > > When you're learning something new, it's easy for bad form to go unnoticed > unless someone points it out -- this is true in golf, tennis, Emacs, or > whatever -- and over time bad form becomes a bad habit. Until you hit a > wall, you may not realize your stroke has a serious flaw because that's the > way you've always done it and so you've never thought to change it. > > While there are thousands of books, videos, and instructors to help you > learn proper form for stuff like golf and tennis, there aren't too many > resources teaching proper Emacs form. > > When I started using Emacs ~15 years ago, I learned the keyboard > combinations in a certain way and this habit continued for years. But when > I moved to Clojure, I hit a wall because swank and nrepl enable you to > evaluate values in the buffer and so my workflow changed and my key combo > usage skyrocketed. > > Eventually my knuckles and fingers were feeling it from > the repetitive stress so I started looking around for solutions, such as > swapping the Ctrl key with the Caps Lock key, getting special > hacker-friendly keyboards, and I even considered switching to Vi. > > Then one day I had an epiphany -- I had been doing it wrong -- I had been > using my left hand and only my left hand for all the key combinations. > > For example, if you look at the keyboard shortcuts on the nrepl wiki ( > https://github.com/kingtim/nrepl.el), you'll see the command to "evaluate > the top level form under point and display the result in the echo area" is > C-M-x. > > Before I realized my bad habit, I would contort my left hand to hit "Ctrl > Alt x" -- this feels awkward and if you do it enough times over the years > the repetitive stress builds up. A better way is to use both hands. This > may seem obvious to those who did it right from the beginning, but if you > start off down the wrong path, it can be a real pain. > > To execute C-M-x using both hands, simultaneously hold down the Ctrl key > with your left pinky while holding down the Alt key with your right thumb, > and hit "x" with your left index finger. Doing it this way feels natural > and smooth. Now I almost always use my right thumb for Meta/Alt, and once I > realized this, the Emacs command combinations made much more sense. > > This simple adjustment changed everything. > > HTH > > - James > > > > On Wednesday, January 16, 2013 8:29:36 AM UTC-6, Colin Yates wrote: > > > > Hi all, > > > > After 15 off years of using IDEs I am making the jump into Emacs. I have > > read http://dev.clojure.org/display/doc/Getting+Started+with+Emacs and > > https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit and I am just at the > > point where I have stopped yelling at paredit and starting to appreciate > > its point. > > > > My current major stumbling block though is navigating my project. Whilst > > (I expect) the density and sane namespacing capabilities of Clojure to > > significantly reduce the number of files, that isn't true of everything. > > In particular, ExtJS encourages you to follow the "one file per class". > > You don't have to but eventually you will have more than a handful of > > files regardless. > > > > So my questions: > > - is there a decent project explorer. I really miss the "tree on the > > left, editor on the right" layout > > - is there a decent JS and clojure autocompletion aware plugin > > - other than paredit, nrepl and clojure-mode (and the excellent > > coffee-mode for coffeescript), what other plugins should I install > > > > Thanks all. > > > > Col > > > > P.S> Please don't turn this into a flame war :) > > > > -- > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your > first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Clojure" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- Softaddicts<lprefonta...@softaddicts.ca> sent by ibisMail from my ipad! -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. 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