You operate better in Emacs if you touch type, but you should learn to touch type if you work in an editor a lot
You rarely need to hold more than crtl, shift and a character, and you have ctrl and shift both sides of the keyboard so it's easy
Meta is toggled in the default configuration tap it then do whatever key combinations.
Ctrl+g cancels partly complete commands



You can't spare 8 meg? I have games that want 8 gig