I was a long time vim only user, that lived and breathed in the terminal. Then I found Doom Emacs, and it gave me everything I never knew I wanted or needed. I'd highly recommend giving doom emacs a try. There is also a great series of videos on how to use Doom Emacs on youtube.
Started with a vanilla config and remapped caps to ctrl. After a while I got emacs pinky, so I decided to switch to spacemacs and vim key bindings. I tried doom-emacs and a couple of other "emacs-distros", but I kept coming back to spacemacs.
The combination of 'evil' together and chords, like pressing 'fd' or 'jk' in short succession working as an escape key made me rely a whole lot less on the pinky.
A while ago I went all in on rolling my own config, now that I know how I want my environment. Next step for me will be learning to type on a keyboard with a thumb cluster to rely even less on the pinky.
Sometimes I have doubts. I wonder if I am doing this all wrong? Maybe a step backwards would be better - just use gedit or acme and a mouse? Unfortunately, I think I am too far down the rabbit hole to look back up now.
I use a Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard that has Ctrl, Alt (Meta for Emacs), and Win at the space bar. Some ergonomic setup like this is going to work much better than the usual suggestion of remapping CapsLock to Ctrl.
I second the suggestion of getting ergonomic keyboards with thumb clusters.
I also have the Kinesis advantage 2, and am also a fan of the convex keys. I also ordered a Kinesis 360 several months ago, but have not received it yet.
I fixed all my pinky problems by remapping the modifiers from the standard
Ctrl Win Alt Space Alt Menu Win
to
Win Alt Ctrl Space Ctrl Alt Win
which allows me to use my thumbs for ctrl bindings, without using a nonstandard layout (well I'm using a Kinesis Freestyle2 so it's not entirely standard). I also worked on my typing a lot and specifically forced myself to use the ctrl key on the opposite side of the letter key in ctrl-letter bindings.
Not only has it made emacs much more ergonomics it also carries to the keybindings of other programs too, most of which are control key based. Using a hardware programmable keyboard makes it possible for me to use those remaps without admin access or installing any programs in every OS (corporate environment).
I have used Emacs for around 5 years now (about as long as I used Vim) and I find the Emacs keybindings more ergonomical. Though that might just be because I have long and agile fingers.
100% agree re: Doom Emacs. Evil mode user and no issues with emacs pinky ;-). It's a perfect match. No concerns about performance either, start my emacs in the morning and close it at the end of the day.
For quick command line things or remote tasks I still use Vim. I know, I know, emacs does all that also.
I don't know for sure what the emacs pinky is but one of the things doom does is maps the ctrl key to space bar, I find myself rarely having to leave home row now.
