Oh no! It's the pinky ponk!

So my pinky is feeling a little sore from the terribly placed control key. I tried mapping caps lock as control, but for some reason I automatically go straight for the one in the corner. I've been idly wishing that a Space Cadet keyboard would just show up at my door, but that hasn't worked. Time for some action.

The poor man's path is to just monkey with the keyboard settings.

Caps Lock should die. Unless you're a vi user and are unable to press more than one key at a time, it is really a useless key. It's now my Command key. Ideally I'd like to make it Rubout but (a) Apple won't let me do that, and (b) there's a fine line between messing with settings and starting a Symbolics cargo cult.

Other than that, I just swapped Control and Command. Even though I'd already used Caps Lock as Command, I decided I wanted to get out of the habit of hitting it with my pinky.

One day in, I'm finding it works pretty well. I'm using Caps Lock for all my Command needs, rarely going for the remapped Control key. I am frequently hitting the wrong keys, but nothing disastrous has happened yet. Using Command as Control works great with all the Emacs-like bindings in OSX, and I'm using my new Right Control key all the time for stuff like C-d (delete forward), whereas I never really use it when I have a keyboard with a real physical Right Control. Having Control keys right next to the space bar is awesome.

How am I going to live a normal life with this keyboard layout? I don't know. Since I started using a Macbook at home, I keep accidentally hitting Alt like it's Command on the keyboard at work - key combos that a few weeks ago were burned into my muscle memory have evaporated. I figure if I'm already confused, a little more won't hurt!

If it works OK at home I'd like to use the same setup at work. My main concern is pair programming. I used to have my parens and brackets swapped (a la the Space Cadet) at work, and even though the guys I pair with were prepared to use my crazy setup, it kept breaking our concentration. I made a shortcut for flipping them back whenever I was pairing, but I ended up just leaving it as normal all the time. I loved having them swapped, but I didn't stick with it.

I'll see how long I can last this time. So far, so good...