Hand position for Ctrl key?

I am referring to touch typing, it is a bit painful to Ctrl + ~, is there a better way to do that?

We can press it with bottom start of the pinky finger.

Practice this key hand positioning, it will payoff in the long run.

Ctrl + Shift + ~ for opening terminal

Make a karate movement!

Ctrl for control key combinations

We can press it with bottom start of the pinky finger.

📝 The second trick I have learned sometime from some reddit post

Happy coding!

Comments

[Alg]

For me it's super hard to reach how it was shown in the post above.
My most unused keys are: cap locks, right alt, right shift, left alt.
You could, for example, do this:

1. If ALT key is easily reachable with your thumb, swap CTRL and ALT. It is hard to learn using it.
2. Cap locks - backspace
3. Right shift - I have it as ESC because I was using VIM a few months ago
4. Right alt - make it act like some FN key, e.g. holding it and pressing WASD would make them work as arrow keys, or maybe Home up/dn, Page up/dn?

If CTRL/ALT/Shift is a huge problem for you, and you don't play video games, you can try home row modifiers:
there's Super/ALT/CTRL/Shift on both sides of your keyboard and when you press a key shortly, it will act as a key press, not a modifier. If you hold it and press any other key, it will act as a modifier.

[Janardhan Pulivarthi]

Hi @algj update after 3 months,

It was a bit uncomfortable to use the position in this post, but now I am smoothly able to press Ctrl+R, Ctrl+Shift+~, and Ctrl+ .

If ALT key is easily reachable with your thumb, swap CTRL and ALT. It is hard to learn using it.

I started using ALT key with thumb nowadays.

thanks

[Viktor Kulikov]

Recently, have known about Karabiner on Mac. It allows to reassign Caps Lock key for ESC if pressed single and for CTRL + key if pressed with another key

[Babak K. Shandiz]

And why not using the right Ctrl (or Shift + Ctrl) with your right hand?

[Janardhan Pulivarthi]

Lazyness to fire up the terminal 😅. Using one hand to fire up is really useful there.

That's a real deal.

[Radu-Alexandru B]

In Windows, you can use AutoHotKey to map every command you can think of to every possible key or combinations of keys.

I wrote some articles about this a while ago, you can find them here: dev.to/radualexandrub/top-8-macros...

[Janardhan Pulivarthi]

In that position, reaching to ~ felt difficult for me.

[Waylon Walker]

I use a corne and hit control with my thumb.

[Janardhan Pulivarthi]

Buying corne is in my wishlist, hope to earn that much sometime in future.

For people who want to know more about corne: github.com/foostan/crkbd

[Jean Carlos]

My gamer fingers aren't scared performing any akward positions hahaha

[Janardhan Pulivarthi]

I wish I could do that.

[Bobo Brussels]

I have never gotten this detailed 😅

[Salma Alam-Naylor]

My trouble is with "shift + |" all with the right hand. Have tried to train myself to press shift with the left hand. Not happening. Pls help.

[Janardhan Pulivarthi]

You can press shift with left hand, like a karate hand strike. And | with right hand pinky finger.

If you see the first (ctrl +shift + ~) press position in this post, you place more pressure on shift key.

[Brad]

Ctrl + Shift + ~

I don't think I've ever had to execute this shortcut to open a terminal on any of my systems, or if they were there I never used it. I have had to use Ctrl + Shift + ESC, which is similar, but this usually is a "one-time-task" such as opening something that I wont ever close/toggle.

Currently in windows I use Win + ~ to toggle a "quake" terminal. Almost the same thing, but without the nasty Shift.

[PNS11]

$ setxkbmap -option ctrl:swapcaps