Why in the world were my super and meta keys suddenly swapped? I finished a game and found that suddenly my alt/meta key and my super/windows key had swapped positions. I tried changing from Dvorak to Qwerty and back again, and tried restarting my keyboard and then restarting my whole computer, and found no explanation for the problem. Finally I found the answer1, which was that somewhere in my baby-in-arms, trying-to-keyboard-with-one-hand, I had switched my keyboard into mac mode, which inverts the super and meta keys and destroys my carefully crafted muscle memory.

Intro One of the great pieces of advice I received for setting up Dvorak keys was to swap C-x and C-u keys, and the following snippet does just that. ;; Dvorak settings (keyboard-translate ?\C-u ?\C-x) (keyboard-translate ?\C-x ?\C-u) I had hoped that a simple replacement of the the C with M would make that change for Meta, too, since M-x is common and awkward on Dvorak. However, that gave me a type error.

My heavy emacs use was both the motivation and the obstacle to switching to a new keyboard layout. Motivation because my life is keyboard driven, so there are healh and efficiency reasons to want to make the best of my keyboard experience. Obstruction because so much of my emacs and typing proficiency is in my muscle memory, and this might be lost if I make a drastic change. Well, rather than Colemaks or QwertZ, which aim to maintain most of your muscle memory, I decided to go whole hog and do Dvorak.

Why Keyboard Driven Editing in this age of the mouse? First of all, the mouse is easy – you don’t need to learn anything to point, drag, and click. And for many problem spaces this is ideal: I browse the web with a mouse (usually because my work as a web application engineer requires it), and I wouldn’t dream of attempting keyboard-driven image editing such as with Gimp or InkScape.