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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend getting used to it. Being able to keep your hands on the home row, even on a laptop, is a huge boon; I can't really claim it's a productivity increase (I have no idea if it is), but it just feels so much better and more fun to type that way.

Actually, the same is true of most vim stuff: does being able to delete text 2 seconds quicker really make you more productive? Beats me. But after you get used to being able to tell the computer what you want to happen and have it happen (e.g., delete everything inside these parentheses), using the old method of moving around the cursor just feels bad.

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I've never understood this. I have to take my (other) hand off to hit esc and get out of insert mode anyway. Additionally the fact that vim (as opposed to vi) gets rid of the diagonal movements negates a lot of the benefit for me. I also switch into "nethack" mode when I try to use hjkl and that's never good for productivity.

There are two tricks to fix the escape problem.

First, you can use ctrl+[ to get out of insert, which means moving your hands less.

Even better (but requires customization), you can remap "jk" to get out of insert mode. Since "jk" is a combination that never comes up in actual writing, it works great. And it means you don't have to move your hands at all from home row.

To help the parent and or vim newbies avoid a google, and to show why this "customization" isn't scary or hard, all you need to do:

    :imap jk <Esc>

(Literally type the angle brackets.) And if you want this as a standard default, make a .vimrc file in your home folder and stick the above without the colon in there.

I love you both.

In English, maybe. In Danish there are plenty of jk's in actual writing. Ctrl+[ is terribly inaccessible on a bunch of international keyboards. Ctrl-C is the good one, really.

The point is to map some easily-typed, but rarely-used, key combination as your escape key. I use jj. On the rare occasions I have to actually type jj, I just wait about a half second after typing the first j, and then the second j is received as a separate keystroke, and not interpreted as the second part of a mapping.

And the only times I remember having to actually type jj are when I'm having the Vim keymapping conversation with somebody who asks "So how do you type 'jj'?

Clearly the right way is 2ij^[

(EDIT: uhh, the :) is a smiley, not part of the command)

It's a shame that all tutorials apparently tells you to use ESC to get out of insert mode. The real way to do it is Ctrl-c, which keeps you on the home row. It works even better if you map Caps Lock to Ctrl.

You can also use Ctrl-[ to go to normal mode.

Ctrl-O takes you to normal mode for a single command and then automatically goes back to insert mode.

Frankly, I find it easier to map Caps to Escape. Only problem is when you use other people's systems and you keep hitting caps lock when you mean to hit escape (Even if you're not in Vim)

The trick with mapping Caps Lock to Ctrl is that you can use it for all your regular Ctrl-shortcuts. At least on MacBooks the regular Ctrl is placed totally impossible.

But yeah, I /can't/ use others computers without getting utterly frustrated because of that. :)

If you have a proper keyboard with a wrist rest, you only have to extend your fingers to press esc (not actually lift your hand, or move your whole hand which requires moving your whole under arm, if you're typing on a keyboard without wrist rest and where you have your hands hover over the keyboard. Ctrl-c requires you to twist your wrist in an awkward angle, several times a minute. If you keyboard really puts the esc key far away from the home row, you can remap caps lock to esc.

All of this assume that you type 10-finger blind, but I guess if you can't even do that you have other priorities than learning vim.

Taking your hands off of home row to get out of insert is also easily soluble -- you can map literally any key combo to esc. I use command-i (on a Mac), which is effortless to type and feels nicely symmetric to using i for insert.

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