Emacs - disable return and backspace keys

Question

I have recently been feeling RSI setting in (I have had it before).

I have been paying attention to what effects my hands and the right hand bending out to press the backspace and return keys seem to be causing a lot of the problem.

I have defined "M-d" to backwards delete, which works fine, and I know about "C-m" entering a newline but I still keep involuntarily pressing the actual keys so I want to disable them in emacs.

I tried this:

(global-unset-key "\r")

But this breaks "C-m" as well So I added this line:

(global-set-key "\C-m" 'newline)

But that restores the return key as well.

Please show me how to unbind just the return and backspace keys whilst maintaining the other bindings

Answer 1

Setting return and backspace to do nothing should work. That is, these two lines should suffice:

(global-set-key (kbd "<return>") 'ignore)
(global-set-key (kbd "<backspace>") 'ignore)

This will leave keystrokes like C-m operational.