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Comment by barrowclift | Hacker News Reader

I highly encourage mapping the Escape key to the Caps Lock key for a couple days and seeing how it feels. I gave it a spin last year out of curiosity and have since fallen in love with it. My poor pinky no longer has to frequently stretch out to the farthest upper left reaches of the keyboard!

If you're on macOS, you can do this in System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... and selecting the "Escape" in the Caps Lock dropdown.

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I've been using Caps Lock for CTRL for years now. Instead of Caps Lock for Escape, in Vim, I use jj and that has served me well. I mention this because there are others out there that have already remapped Caps Lock, and mapping to escape might not work well for them.

I tried all the above suggestions for extended periods of time. Ultimately the most productive thing for me was caps lock as control, and Ctrl-[ for escape since it works everywhere in the system.

Ctrl-[ is interesting. Haven't seen that one before. Like most people, I'm used to the keys now, and muscle memory drives all. =)

Thanks... unfortunately I've already co-opted the caps lock key to be the control key... a common thing for emacs users to do. Now I need to find another home for esc. shakes fist at sky

Using karabiner-elements, https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/, you can map caps to behave a esc when pressed alone, and as ctrl when pressed with another key.

This guy ️for president. Took me several weeks to adjust. One of the best computing changes I've ever made.

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