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Comment by boobsbr | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, how do you exit vim insert mode without an ESC key?

Either by pressing the virtual "Esc" key displayed on the TouchBar (that's what I do), or by using Ctrl-[, or by remapping any other key to ESC

Ctrl-C also exits insert mode (and replace mode) and some people find that easier to type than Ctrl-[ (especially if you have a keyboard where '[' is not handy)

The Touch Bar has a soft escape key in the same position. It takes a bit to get used to, but I found it find as a non-frequent vim/ESC-key user.

https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/300/other-ways-to-exi...

You can use Ctrl+[

The situation with emacs isn't much better!

Why do you say that? I've used emacs for years and use the escape key very infrequently. (Although I do swap control and caps lock, and have for years.)

At a guess, it's the layout of Ctrl and Alt on Mac keyboards. They're small and crammed right next to each other. It's physically painful to use Mac keyboards for Linux-y tasks and I don't understand people's love of them.

you can bind for example caps lock globally on mac to esc, thats what i did

inoremap jk <esc>

Edsger Dijkstra disapproves.

I'm yet to see a serious VIM user who didn't remap ESC to caps lock yet. Regardless of keyboard configuration.

You must found one.

I used caps lock all the time for its intended function (shocking!), so remapping it is just not an option.

While I haven't remapped it for Esc (I have for Ctrl), you can reassign both keys. It took about a week to get used to it, but now my Control key acts as caps lock and honestly it works like it was designed to work that way. No more accidental hitting of caps lock with my pinky, and no weird gestures to hit a key I use all the time. Not saying your method is by any means worse or wrong, just thought it'd be worth pointing out!

COBOL developer?

IBM Selectrix typewriter trainee. It’s just how we learned to speed type in high school. :-)

This is interesting - what are the typical use cases where you need to write more than 2-4 letters (e.g. "FBI" or "NASA" or something like that) in all caps ? It seems like quite unusual domain of writing - is it legal documents or something like that?

The hardware registers in our designs are all defined and used in upper case.

The file names in our code base have a lot of upper case in them as well.

But the real reason is tbat I learned speed typing in high school on an IBM Selectrix typewriter. I use CAPS LOCK even for FBI and NASA. It comes totally natural to me.

Also, if you ever use SQL with the all-caps convention for commands; my right pinky hurts thinking about using shift for all of this.

I can't do that because I've already mapped Caps Lock to Ctrl... Also being a heavy Tmux user, it seemed more useful at the time.

Get Karabiner-Elements and you can map press-and-hold on caps lock to control and press-and-release on caps lock to esc. Massive win for emacs users and most vim users I have introduced it to seem to like it.

Ooo, interesting! I'll definitely look into that when I go into one of my next "optimize my workflow as a form of procrastination" mindsets I tend to end up in

ControllerMate is another really powerful tool, though not just for keyboards but for USB devices in general. Interface is a bit funky but it's really worth checking out, not just mapping but conditional reactions, timing, scripting, for any key or arbitrary combinations of keys or non-keyboard devices (I made a DS4 work with a Mac at launch except for the touchpad part of it for example).

HHKB users probably haven't as that key is Ctrl on their keyboard.

been using vim for almost 10 years now, never remapped esc to caps, because remapping caps to control is a lot more comfortable for me.

i could do the tap -> esc, hold -> control, but every solution i tried has some delay that makes it super uncomfortable.

Try getting in the habit of typing escape with Ctrl-[

You don't know many serious vim users. I remapped Caps Lock to control years ago (primarily for the tmux prefix ctrl+a), and escape is remapped to jj. So easy. Besides, my understanding was that Escape wasn't an option on Mac until a couple years ago.

> Besides, my understanding was that Escape wasn't an option on Mac until a couple years ago.

Indeed, Mac keyboards didn't originally have Escape or Control keys; they weren't added until 1987.

The escape key is there in terminal in same position it would be if there was no touchbar. Its been a complete non issue that people who do not have the touchbar like to complain about.

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