The Control Key (on a Mac)

[Happy Ent]

My life sucks.

Our good friends at Cupertino have graces us with an update of their operating system OS X (version 10.12, code name Sierra).

It breaks the key remapping software that I and every other sane person on the world is using: Remap the useless Caps Lock key to both Control and Escape.

You see, even normal people want to remap Caps Lock to Control. You never need Caps Lock for anything, and Control is a super-useful modifier key (for instance, the Mac natively supports both Ctrl-H (for backspace) and Ctrl-W (for delete word to the left) which—if you are a touch typist—makes your typing much faster and keeps your fingers on home row. Provided Ctrl is accessible, such as on the Caps Lock key.

Of course, if you are like me, you do most of your typing (outside of Westeros.org) in Vim, so you need to tap Escape all the time. But—bliss!—the wonderful applications Seil and Karabiner made it possible to remap Caps Lock to both Escape (when the key is tapped) and Control (when the key is used in combination with another key, i.e., as a modifier.)

Life was perfect.

And now, this no longer works.

I have remapped Caps Lock to Escape, because otherwise I’ll to crazy.

That leaves Ctrl. I cannot even understand which finger you’re supposed to use—pinky? So how do you do Ctrl-W quickly, without breaking your typing? Or do you use the left thumb? These are honest questions. If you use Ctrl, please tell me how you actually access it.

Otherwise, I’m tempted to remap it to right Command, which (as far as I can observe myself while typing) I never use. Does anybody have any experiences with that?

[Altherion]

I don't have a Mac, but looking at the MacBookPro, its control key is in roughly the same place as my Ctrl key. To do Ctrl-W, I use my left ring finger for Ctrl and left pointing finger for the W. That said, I mainly use Ctrl-W in Emacs where it means "cut the selected text" so I'm not too worried about it breaking my flow of typing as this is typically a special operation.

[Happy Ent]

When I was an emacs user (which I was for 20 years or so), I always had Caps Lock mapped to Control. Control is of major importance for emacsing.

You seem to move your hand from home row a lot. I try to avoid that (and my wrists are very grateful for it. I also type much faster that way.)