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Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

Especially since the whole virtual escape key thing– being a default layout vim user for 20+ years– I'd love to follow suit, but I need Adobe Creative Suite. The tools available on Linux aren't even ballpark. Getting OS X on a VM has always been fussy and frustrating, and if I wanted to work with Windows I'd just use a Windows laptop. On top of that, the apple magic trackpad is just great. Fussing with extracted bootcamp drivers to get it to work on a virtualized windows so I can run some essential software? No thanks. I need quick access to a comfortable, familiar replacement environment if something goes wrong with my regular computer. I can't afford to futz around with that stuff.

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> Especially since the whole virtual escape key thing– being a default layout vim user for 20+ years

I really don't understand how there can be vim users that haven't remapped escape.

Like, if you care about ergonomics enough to complain about making a rarely used key into a touch key, how can you not care enough to remap that key if you use it more often?

And Mac OS even has built-in support to remap caps-lock to escape, and has had for a long time I think.

Funny side-note: I've broken the keycap for my escape key (on a TypeMatrix keyboard).. yet I haven't bothered to try to fix it. It's just not worth the trouble.

I've been using the escape key for vim since I started work as a programmer 21 years ago. That's a long time and I really don't want to change it. I know it might seem silly to you, but I'd switch to Linux on an XPS before I'd upgrade to a Mac with no escape key. (Not that I have to, plenty of Macs available without the touchbar)

FWIW, I've been using the touchbar MBP for ~6 months now and I haven't had any issues hitting ESC. It definitely feels different, but it works just fine. If anything my problem is that I hit ESC too easily now. I used to rest my hand above the ESC key when web browsing but that translated to resting it above tilde on the keyboard, which meant touching the ESC area. I've had to train myself to not do this.

I don't remap esc to caps-lock. I use my caps-lock key all the time. My number keys have to be shifted to use, so I just use caps-lock instead.

Some of us have been using vi/vim since before it was even possible to remap keys on our computing devices...

That is impressive. Since before xmodmap on a device that didn't either have ctrl-key positioned so that "^]" was easier, or had the esc key closer to home row?

I've used various serial terminals, including, IIRC, the ADM-3A, which had ESC next to the 'q' key.

I had never gotten in the habit of using "^]". And I, like some others, do like my caps-lock right where it is these days, because I use it a lot.

I have large hands, so I 'like' vim escape key being mapped to the actual escape key. I also have 20+ years of muscle memory backing it up. I also do a fair amount of setting up servers or virtual environments and like to have my editor already set up on every machine I touch. I also use caps lock for writing SQL. So yes, there are people who haven't remapped it 'yet' and as long as it's still there, never will.

My only vim customization is `:imap kj <Esc>`.

Takes 10s to write into a .vimrc on any new computer.

the ONLY one?! wow.

some people differentiate between customisation and setting flags like turning on syntax highlighting, fwiw.

My daily drive is spacemacs, all the tweaking is there.

ahh, that makes a lot more sense. :)

I remap jk too so you just mash them both at the same time and it doesn't matter the order.

Just use ctrl-c, no configuration necessary

I use that method too. When I found out it was available I ditched my experiments with jj, jk, etc. This and finding out how many users just use / for most of their higher-level navigation needs has helped me quite a bit.

It is important to note that they aren't identical:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53633/does-using-ctr...

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