geekhack

geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: incandescentman on Thu, 06 March 2014, 15:05:29

Title: Prose editing tasks on Advantage Kinesis?
Post by: incandescentman on Thu, 06 March 2014, 15:05:29

Hello community,

So I'm not a developer. I'm a writer and editor. I spend most of my day typing lots of prose in English using GNU Emacs on my MacBook. Since writing is mostly revising and editing, I spend a lot of time going back through my prose, cutting and pasting, deleting words, killing lines, and rewriting phrases.

I don't use the mouse/trackpad for any of this. Here are the activities I do a lot of:

• Using option-right and option-left to go through sentences word-by-word. I like to go back through every sentence using my cursor as a guide so there's something I want to edit, my cursor is already right there. Since I'm changing whole words and not, say, spelling, I want to go word-by-word, not character by character which is much slower. Option-arrowkey does this.
• Using shift-option-arrowkey to highlight entire phrases. To delete them, or more frequently, cut and paste them. This means shift-option, left, shift-option-right, shift-down, and shift-up.
• Backward-deleting entire words. Option-backspace.
• Killing entire lines. CTRL-k.
• Jumping to beginning and end of lines. CTRL-A and CTRL-E.

I can do all of this with incredible efficiency with my MacBook's built-in keyboard. Using the shift-option-arrowkeys, I accomplish #1 and #2 much faster than I do using Emacs keybindings to do the same tasks.

However, doing this on my MacBook is killing my wrists.

I got an Advantage Kinesis, and I really like it for typing. What I'm not sure about is the editing functions. With default layout, the whole option-shift-arrowkey thing is impossible. So is option-shift-arrowkey followed by a quick option-delete without shifting hands.

Has anyone had success doing prose editing tasks with the Advantage Kinesis? Have you found alternative keyboard mappings that facilitate this?

Do you think there's a good way to do this? Or should I give it up and switch to some other mechanical keyboard when I need to do actual editing?