Table of Contents

1. Emacs Pinky:

Because keyboards are designed around typing and not around our editors, odd issues like this can happen: CTRL in normal computing isn’t used quite as often as it is when running emacs. As a result, repeated overextension of the pinkey finger can cause gnarly issues to arise with your hands. This little guide hopes to help anyone interested in Emacs to avoid months-long recovery of your hands (particularly the little finger)…

Unfortunately, remapping keys in Linux is a bit of a chore and how to go about it “depends” on what flavor of Linux you like.

1.1. Arch

1.2. Debian/Ubuntu

#/etc/default/keyboard

# NOTE: Comment out rather than replace, in case you want to go back...

# To swap Caps with ctrl:
XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:swapcaps"

# to change JUST CAPSLOCK (leaving ctrl)
XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps"

# Apply the configuration (run in shell)
#sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

1.3. KDE and More generally

Often, built-in GUI settings has keyboard options which usually allow you to change these settings.

kde-keyboard-settings.png

By the way, this is how I like to display images in Org mode. I find it exports nicely to HTML this way, and have html-style controls (align, width, etc) right there in the header…

Emacs can actually view images, so it’s almost as easy to go, find the image, open&view it, and save the link to it and paste here:

  1. Find/view the file <SPC> .
  2. Save the location <SPC> f y
  3. Change to previous buffer <SPC> b p
  4. Yank the URL (from normal mode) p
  5. (Optionally) convert to relative path… C-l
  6. Add captions, formatting, etc?

2. Personal Recommendation:

I highly recommend remapping both ESC and CAPSLOCK if you’re using Doom (evil) mode. Train your other hand to use CTRL with some other finger?

Author: Matthew Younger

Created: 2026-01-13 Tue 17:59