it seems that swapping alt and ctrl gives a better comfort (swap cmd to ctrl on mac keyboard), then just use C-g to escape stuff (instead of remapping capslock to esc)

although, probably becomes better with foot pedal then forget the C and M keys (and even S if triple pedal)

I swapped ctr and alt (meta) on my laptop keyboard. Pretty happy with it. But it's a bummer that it's not possible to remap them within emacs. (The last time I looked into it, it didn't seem like emacs could rebind keys for C and M)

yes, I think you are forced to change it in the os level, although I'm not sure completely

I was actually forced to do this because the kinesis freestyle2's left ctrl is too far, so doing C-x C-* becomes painful

my initial approach was to use both pinky when pressing keys just to minimize the left pinky's over usage, even using the knuckle approach but still getting numbness when done too long

so I guess using the thumb for ctrl is the most suitable and comforting (although confusing at first, esp. when you change from work to home computers, and keyboards)

... and I've read one of Xah Lee's posts and learned that the emacs was originally designed for the lisp machine keyboards, which ironically, has the ctrl keys near the thumb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard#/media/File:Space-cadet.jpg

I mostly use the Kinesis Advantage now, and have both ctrl and alt mapped to thumb keys

(I was in part inspired by that article)

is evil-lisp-state basically evil+paredit done right?