That's exactly what I always do, and is easily done in both Mac OS X and in most Linux distributions.

Because this frees up the ctrl key to be an extra backspace!

You did when he wrote that article. And it was a right pain too...

It's not old, it's just wrong to emphasize _the tool_ so much. Don't know about the author, but being productive doesn't equal being masterful typist. I had a member of the team, who was above average productive in notepad (yes, notepad!) and I also had someone who was below average productive in emacs (I always let the programmers decide, what tool they use). And I am not talking about being fast, but about producing quality code.