I heard about RMS acquiring RSI of the left wrist, presumably from the ‘ctrl-x’ plus other keys.

<http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_hand_pain_celebrity.html>

1. Is this a ’thing’ or blown out of proportion?

2. Since Function keys & they were programmable, I gather ‘gun’ emacs users don’t have the RSI problem. Is this correct?

3. I’ve never heard of people with RSI from using ‘vi’/‘vim’. Is this right?

On 22 Jul 2025, at 05:46, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:

My beef with EMACS is that it's too finger-busy.  All that ctrl-x prefix business.  I'm not fond of vi either.  The only vi command I ever learned was ESC-:q! so that I could get out of vi if I accidentally got into it.  I was involved in developing products for both Linux and Windows.  I did all my text editing on Windows and copied the files to Linux for building and testing.

I like the joke about EMACS being an acronym for Escape-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift.

-Paul W.

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