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Comment by a-b | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact about vim:

When vi was originally designed the most popular keyboard was ADM-3A and later IBM XT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#/media/File:IB... The layout of this keyboard has Control on the place where modern keyboards have a CapsLock key. Naturally that's why vi and vim was meant to use CTRL-[ to exit to the normal mode.

25 years later Apple introduced ToughBar and made ESC key virtual. As result remapped CapsLock-[ make sense again ;)

edit: Add ADM-3A keyboard

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> when vi was originally produced most popular keyboard was IBM XT.

Probably not, since the IBM XT was five years in the future.

The canonical vi keyboard is the ADM-3A. http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:Lear_Siegler_A... Escape is almost as accessible as Control.

The ADM-3A also explains why shells use ‘~’ to represent the home directory.

You're right, thanks for your correction. My main point was a location of the Control key. I guess with IBM XT keyboard CTRL-[ become a most reasonable option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#/media/File:IB...

I was curious about some keys I hadn't seen before, so for anyone curious, here's the purpose of the "rub" and "here is" keys (from the ADM-3A operators manual[0] page 3-7 and 3-8):

RUB. When the RUB (rubout) key is typed while holding down the SHIFT key, a non-displayable rubout code (ASCII DEL) is transmitted to the computer. The cursor is not advanced and the character code stored in display memory is not overwritten. RUB is normally used to tell the computer that a previous character should be deleted.

HERE IS. If the Answer Back option is installed, typing this key transmits an identification message (stored in a special ADM-3A memory) that identifies the terminal and alerts the host computer that a message is to follow. If no Answer Back option is installed, the key has no function.

[0] http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/altair/d/adm3a.pdf

For the reason DEL is shifted ‘_’, see your friendly neighbourhood ASCII table, and/or one of the recent HN threads¹. The ADM-3A² is a good example of a bit-paired keyboard³.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13539552

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard

Also notice the arrows on H J K L.

Promoting bad habits. Don't use the left-right arrow keys to move around!

The left - right with the H J K L keys? Or the normal Keys ? And why is this a bad habit?

Moving around with hjkl is a bad habit to be discouraged. It's not the vi way.

Well, j and k are fine if you're not moving far. A lot of slow scrolling up and down should be { and } or C-d and C-u or <count>[jk]. Even better: Use / and ?. It's bad to be repeatedly tapping j and k or waiting for the keys to repeat.

But h and l are the EMACS approach. You should be moving in a line with w, e, b, f, F, t, T, ^, $, I, A, 0, and the like. Vi provides lots of tools for efficient line editing and h and l are not good.

Beginners should try

    :noremap h <nop>
    :noremap l <nop>

to keep them from the temptation of the nefarious h and l keys.

Lately I use

    :no h ^
    :no l $

which is even better because ^ and $ require moving your hands off the home row even though they're much better than h and l for you.

Huh. The "vim way" goal posts have moved even further. Used to be "no-op your arrow keys and use hjkl", now it's "noop your hjkl keys".

Something I, as a dedicated VIM user, will never do. 'hjkl' work fine, and are a good addition to 'we{}$0' and so forth. I can't personally find the value of hobbling myself for the sake of meeting someone else's definition of the ideal user.

I even occasionally use the arrow keys. Heresy, I know.

> The ADM-3A also explains why shells use ‘~’ to represent the home directory.

Is that also the origin of '^' being start of line in a regex?

Good guess, but no. The ADM-3A dates to 1976, but the regular expression syntax is definitely earlier: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/qedman.html

Wow this is a better and cleaner/streamlined keyboard layout than I have on my 2015 MacBook Pro :(

Actually I have remapped Caps-Lock to ESC and when pressed longer than a few ms to Ctrl system wide for years, with the Karabiner app.

I read about that neat productivity boost that also reduces the strain on your left hand a lot in a blogpost which "sold" this idea as "this is how VIM was intended to work" and I really love it. Useful even for normal terminal combos like Ctrl+C.

Only downside is, once you get used to it, you just can't go back ;-)

Sadly on macOS Sierra, you have to use Karabiner-Elements, which doesn't (yet, I hope) include support for long-press=ctrl.

If you're fine giving up caps lock, Sierra makes it easy to remap caps lock to esc in Systems Preferences (it even disables the little green light on the key)

Wow, that's news to me! How I've waited for Apple to do this. Karabiner-Elements does some shady stuff with the kernel and in my experience makes the machine a lot less reliable.

Sadly, that isn't as powerful as what our comment-ancestors do with Karabiner. Such an accessible and prominent key as Caps Lock is, IMHO, wasted if only used for ESC; using it both for Control when in combinations and ESC when alone makes the most sense.

I use Caps Lock for Cmd or Ctrl, depending on which keyboard I'm using, and <Leader><Leader> for Escape on Vim.

I don't know where I got this idea from, but I also use <Leader>w to exit to normal mode and save. It's so ingrained in me, that when I use other editors very often I have "Unexpected token" errors because of a ",w" in the middle of the code.

FWIW you can also use Keyboard Maestro to solve this problem.

I use Keyboard Maestro for exactly this purpose. For the most part, it is great. However, it does just stop working every now and then, at least for me, which is mildly irritating.

There is a pull request to implement this feature: https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/pull/247

I haven't tried it myself. Honestly it's one of the things keeping me from upgrading to Sierra. Need to test it out first.

I am surprised to learn that the set of people who use vim and the set of people who have patience to "long-press" intersects!

Any way to do the remap with Gnome on Linux?

gnome-tweak-tool --> Typing --> Caps lock key behavior --> (near the bottom) select the swap option

> once you get used to it, you just can't go back

So true. So many capital letters typed and deleted.

Also worth noting: Ctrl+[ = ESC in ASCII, which is where the keyboard shortcut comes from.

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/

And it is processed not by Vim itself, but by the terminal emulator that sends Esc character to Vim. So the shortcut Ctrl+[ was not invented by vi author, but is a consequence of using Esc to exit from the edit mode.

That's fun but not a 'fact'. The ADM-3A keyboard had an 'ESC' key and it was positioned right where the tab key is typically today. Very easy to hit.

Here's a write up with nice pictures.

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys...

Why does a combo with two keys on opposite sides of the keyboard make sense? Surely something that can be hit with one hand is easier?

I'll have to try this for a week.

I personally find using two hands for pressing key combinations more comfortable than holding a modifier key with a pinky and reaching for the other key.

Right, but wouldn't you prefer using one key?

Because Ctrl+[ = ESC in ascii

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/

Back then there was no mouse so both of your hands were on the keyboard full time. If you have two hands, it's a shame not to use them both.

Why not use "jk" or "jj"?

Discovering this really changed Vim for me. That and remapping j and k to move over visual lines instead of logical lines.

Personally that slows down normal usage of j too much for me.

It doesn't have an effect if you type a single `j`.

These can be convenient if you are only entering text manually. But remapping regular -- albeit rare -- text sequences can have unexpected results when pasting copied content into insert mode in a terminal window. I've been bitten by this a couple times when pasting base64-encoded data.

This has caught me as well, but it can be avoided by using `:set paste!` to toggle paste mode before pasting. This isn't something I need to worry about often enough but you can map that command if pasting external content is something you do often.

Most terminals support bracketed paste, and vim can automatically toggle pastemode based on the special sequences.

Eg. https://github.com/ConradIrwin/vim-bracketed-paste

What if you want to write "Dijkstra"?

Then you need to switch to Dutch mode...

That's why i use kj.

(Also: quaternions)

Then you wait one second after pressing j (until the timeout is over) and press k.

To be quite honest, that sounds terrible.

I don't think it's bad at all. I very rarely have to write 'jk', and using that combination saves me from having to either reach the escape key or having to use c-[. If the price I have to pay is waiting 0.5s (which is what I have the timeout configured to) once in a while, then I consider this a great tradeoff.

Caps Lock is one key, easier to type, and even more rarely used, though. I highly recommend it. =)

That's what I use too :). I also highly recommend it. I would strongly recommend binding either escape or ctrl to caps lock on every keyboard.

Or you press `<C-v>` before the `j`.

    :ino kj <Esc>
    :ino <Esc> <Nop>

Try it for a week; you'll love it.

I've been using <leader><space> lately, with space as the leader key so just <space><space> really, it's worked well so far.

My employer bought me a macbook with the touchbar and I've had to retrain my muscle memory to use C-[. It took a couple of weeks for it to feel natural but it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. I still haven't found a killer app for the touchbar, though.

Me neither, but the TouchID is terrific.

For me the best way to have an accessible ESC key is just to use Alt-h, Alt-j, or just pressing Alt with any normal mode key. It will work on any vim installation out of the box, it is easily accessible and doesn't require remapping.

As long as your terminal is configured to send the Meta modifier as an ESC prefix rather than a shift bit, and as long as your Alt key serves as Meta.

I've set my capslock to be escape and my alt to be control. I don't know where my alt is, but I've never really used it. (I think the only usecase for alt is Alt-Tab to switch windows, but that always feels epically unpredictable to me. What's going to happen? ... I prefer just clicking on the window I want).

An aside, PC XT keyboards can still be found on ebay for ~$40 and are great to use after being adapted and remapped with a microcontroller.

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