Source: Virtuous code

Lately I do the bulk of my coding on a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. Increasingly

Im also making use of the optional 3-switch foot pedal. Its been interesting
watching the effect this has on my priorities for editor keybindings.
Every keypress or key-chord has an opportunity cost associated with it. Some
are higher than others. Most traditional hacker-oriented tools make certain assumptions about these opportunity costs.
For instance, most tools assume that the opportunity cost for using arrow keys
for navigation is extremely high. This is based on the fact that historically, Unix
terminals often didnt even possess arrow keys, making their opportunity cost
effectively infinite. And even on modern keyboards, they are off in a little remote
island, forcing the user to relocate a hand away from the home row and then
back, even for the smallest cursor motion.
As a consequence, the traditional hackers editors have eschewed arrow key
navigation. Its available, but its not considered the primary navigation center.
So for instance, if there are special bindings for navigating by expression or by
function, they are not built around the arrow keys.
Editor developers have also traditionally recognized that modifier keys have a
high opportunity cost, since on the vast majority of keyboards they involve
stretching a pinkie to full extension while keeping the rest of the hand in position to hit a key. Vim is particularly good about avoiding these digit acrobatics.
Emacs is less sympathetic, but even Emacs usually emphasizes contiguous sequences of simpler key combos over multiple-modifier contortions.
The Kinesis keyboard addresses both of these keyboard shortcomings. On the
Kinesis, you can comfortably use the arrow keys without leaving home position.
Its still a slightly higher opportunity cost than using Vim-style home-row navigation, but its a marginal difference instead of a massive one.
The Kinesis also recognizes what game pad designers have long realized: that
the human thumb is an extraordinarily dexterous organ. It is equally at home
hitting single keys or mashing down multiple buttons at a time. The Kinesis
takes advantage of this fact by organizing modifier keys along with other common non-character keys into thumb islands.

And then theres the optional foot pedal. Using a foot pedal with your keyboard
feels impossibly geeky at first. Until you use it for a while, and then you start
wondering why you didnt recruit your feet for help years ago. Its not like they
had anything better to do all this time. Sewing machines have foot pedals. Cars
have foot pedals. Airplanes have rudder pedals. Why not computers?
The upshot of all this is that a lot of the work that has gone into hacker editors
keybindings doesnt seem to matter to me as much anymore. For instance, Ive
been using RubyMine lot lately (for reasons unrelated to keybindings). People
ask me if I use Emacs or Vim keybindings for it, and I dont. I use the defaults, for
the most part. This includes bindings like Ctrl-Left/Right for wordwise navigation, or Alt-Up/Down for navigating by method. And on the Kinesis, its fine. It
doesnt bother me.
Similarly, its become less urgent to me to explore Vim-style keybindings in
Emacs. Key-chords are now relatively cheap in terms of effort and comfort.
(Although Spacemacs remains intriguing)
Obviously, keybindings are the tiniest tip of the iceberg we it comes to the capabilities and advantages of an editor like Vim or Emacs. Please dont think Im
saying navigation keys are the only things that keep me using mature text editing tools. And of course, theres nothing stopping you from using arrow keys to
navigate around in Emacs or Vim.
But it does have me thinking about how much of those editors UX is designed
around a lowest-common-denominator teletype keyboard, circa 1960.
Theres an argument to be made that this is a good thing. After all, when I take
my laptop out on the deck, or to a cafe, I instantly lose all of those Kinesis advantages (heh). Even if I started carrying an Atreus with me, it doesnt have all
the keys of a Kinesis. Let alone pedals. Perhaps I should emphasize muscle
memory for the subset of comfortable keybindings that are available to me all of
the time, instead of the superset thats available in my home office.
But Im not sure thats such a great idea. A fighter pilot doesnt use a yoke instead of a fly-by-wire joystick just because sometimes she also flies Cessnas.
Maybe its time we started demanding modern programmer-input devices
across the board. Instead of designing input schemes around the limitations of a
device that hasnt changed substantially since it was invented for bashing inked
hammers into a roll of paper.
UPDATE: It occurred to me that I hadnt even mentioned the
Home/End/PageUp/PageDown cluster. This is an example of a set of functions
that most hackers editors use some kind of key sequence or combo for, since
their location is usually as problematic as that of the arrow keys, if not even
more so. But the Kinesis puts these keys in the thumb islands, available without

moving your hands or glancing down. A lot of editor tutorials will try to wean
you off of these keys along with the arrows. But Im finding Im using the dedicated keys more and more (and the alternative keybindings less and less), because Im no longer paying a price for it. Which is nice, because it means I can
use the same muscle memory across all applications.
UPDATE 2: Hi Hacker News! Since I dont feel like wading into the comments
over there, I wanted to quickly address a common theme in some of the comments. Namely: the notion that efficiency is the only axis that a given keyboard/layout/editor combo might be judged on. If youre a young hacker you
may not presently be much concerned about keyboard comfort; but speaking
from the ancient and decrepit age of 34: you will be.
Comments available at: http://devblog.avdi.org/2015/06/04/how-a-keyboardchanged-what-i-look-for-in-an-editor/