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Comment by edw | Hacker News Reader

This may be 90% cargo culting, 10% reality. One of my former co-workers desperately wanted to be perceived as an Excel ninja, and had heard that people who had achieved guru-level Excel mastery would remove their F1 keys, and so one day pried off her F1 key. Meanwhile the person in our office who probably could have written Minecraft in Excel and then built an Excel simulator in Excel Minecraft had a keyboard with a conspicuously intact F1 key.

Same thing happens in programming circles. I am not exempt: All my MacBook keyboards get their caps lock keys remapped to control, in honor of my Apple II childhood and SunOS pizza box college heritage.

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> All my MacBook keyboards get their caps lock keys remapped to control

You must be an emacs heathen.

Caps lock gets remapped to ESC.

Control when held in combination with other keys, ESC when tapped by itself.

How can you do that???

Use Karabiner and the first one here: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/

Isn't the hardcore move to map Caps Lock to Hyper?

http://brettterpstra.com/2017/06/15/a-hyper-key-with-karabin...

on Linux (Ubuntu) the same can be achieved with xcape

> Caps lock gets remapped to ESC

15 year vimmer here. Caps -> Ctrl and use C-[ for going to normal mode.

i also remap caps -> ctrl, but have bindings for `fj` & `jf` in insert mode to exit back to normal mode, on the theory that you basically never have to type either of those letter combos (it has come up maybe twice in the five years i've had it set up). and even if you do have to type one of those letter combos, all you have to do is wait for ~half second between keystrokes and it works fine.

Same, but I use `jk`, which only requires one hand.

A similar binding once nearly drove me insane trying to copy/paste an api key.

Vim should disable all mappings during a paste. And if it's not, you should be able to hit F8 (or `:set paste`) to toggle paste mode.

Ideally, yes. I don't recall all the details -- I typically run fairly lightweight in terms of vim customizations as I'm often multiple SSH sessions deep, sometimes on systems with vi but no vim (they exist!), so automatic pastetoggle is usually off the table regardless.

Edsger Dijkstra does not approve.

another long-time vimmer here, and i'm perfectly happy to reach up and hit esc. caps lock is a lot more useful as ctrl.

I use the one true keyboard and CTRL is already correctly-positioned. Once you ascend there's no going back.

You use an ADM-3A for vim? I am impressed.

Guilty as charged. Does mapping right option to hyper aggravate my sins?

This is spot on. My comment on this thread tried to give some background on how the cargo cult part. The experienced Excel users I know also keep the F1 key right on the keyboard and remap it.

well, emacs, or terminal usage in general on a mac with the control key not on edge of keyboard is extremely unergonomic. So yay to control in the right place.

I'm with you; you're talking to a more than twenty-five year user of Emacs here. I do try, however, to be no less circumspect of my own actions than I am of others'.

Is saving my pinkie from cramping worth losing the ability to type on anyone else's keyboard? I'd say so, but there is a cost.

Yup, I remapped mine out of a reaction to RSI, not nostalgia. I never even thought of that angle before!

Caps lock to control is also super useful for switching tabs in safari. I miss it on my iPad keyboard.

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