It's far less the control key than the meta key for me.

I don't use emacs except once in a blue moon, but do use readline / emacs-style bash commandline editing. The ctrl-mapped features (and yes, I swap capslock/ctrl) are easy. The meta ones ... not so much.

As a random bit of trivia, tapping esc followed by another key counts as hitting meta for that key. It might be easier to simply slap 'esc x' than try to chord alt-x.

I tried, but to no avail. Even if you move Control, you're still chording and that can twist your hands into funny shapes. Not to mention that I never found a good solution for where to remap Meta to; it got to the point where just hitting M-x was really painful.