Emacs keyboard mappings on a macbook

10
votes

I recently switched to a macbook. I miss the right control key and my little finger started to ache and thus I mapped my Cmd to Ctrl inside emacs alone and I've mapped Caps to Ctrl and Ctrl to Caps system-wide.

Does anyone have a better config before I get used to this ? What is yours? I'm particularly interested in the keyboard mappings.

Edit: I'm using aquaemacs and that too for the last few days.

Edit2: I've reset the mapping between Cmd and Ctrl because it felt weird since Cmd is in the position where Meta usually is in the other keyboards.

5
emacsmacos
Which flavour of Emacs are you using? – Timo Geusch
I tend to use my left control key much more than my right, but I hate the fact that the 'fn' key ia where control normally is. I've worked around this this by swapping control and caps-lock, but I'd love a way to swap control and fn. (Just so that it'd be consistent with every other machine I use). – mschaef
@mschaef (setq mac-function-modifier 'control) might help setting fn as Ctrl – rampr

5 Answers

7
votes

Caps lock is control. Never use capslock (alternatively bind it to the conrol you no longer need). Cmd is meta.

Also, while you're at it, ditch aquamacs. Its long been known as "not emacsy enough". Emacs 23 now comes with a cocoa frontend that makes it nice to look at on OSX, so the main reason for using it is no longer necessary.

See: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS#toc11

4
votes

I recently bought an early 2011 MacBook Pro. At first I ran Mac OS X and could not abide the lack of symmetry for the control and meta (alt) keys as is usually found on PC keyboards. But these MBP keyboards do have nicely symmetric option (aka alt) and command (aka apple/win) keys adjacent to either side of the space bar. And even better still is the fact that the System Preferences feature allows one to remap those keys (and the single control key as well). So I put "command" on the control key, "control" on the two option keys and "alt/meta" on the two command keys. Worked for me right up to the point that I could no longer abide Mac OS X any longer and put Kubuntu on my laptop. :-) Kubuntu pretty much provides the same functionality, fwiw.

3
votes

Personally I feel it's best to map both Command keys and both Option keys to Meta (now you'll have more Metas you can press and reduce accidental errors). I have little use for a Super key, but if you do - you might consider using the Options for it. Caps should definitely be remapped to Control - but this is common advice, no matter what keyboard one has. The most valuable keymapping advice I can give you is to remap Return (only when held down) to Control as described here. I used to remap the right Option to Control, but it always felt awkward (+ I lost a valuable key that way) - the Return -> Control solution was truly fantastic improvement for me (and hopefully for others as well).

3
votes

I'm in the same situtation. I finally decided on the following mapping which only took be a day to get used to:

command => option, option => control, control => command,

I just leave cap locks as is.

1
votes

Download free Karabiner app. Remap right option to right control. Done.

https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/