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I recall when touchbar first launched, someone on HN pointed out that Esc is a poor way to use Vim anyway and there are far better mappings. I swapped to Ctrl-[ before I even had a new MBP and much prefer it. The “Esc problem” is a drastic reason to throw your whole hardware/OS stack our the window IMO.

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Caps-lock could work too. As a weird ctrl+c vimmer I probably wouldn't notice. I think my uses of escape in the past year fall into two categories:

- Ctrl-shift-esc (opens the task manager in Windows), and

- Trying to close dialogs when I'm not sure which button is "go away".

As a long time emacs user, I've always had cap-locks mapped as my control key (plus the emacs key-bindings work in html forms and in anything using gnu deadline) which is a bonus. So on my MBP with touch-bar, I have had this mapping so I can have a physical ESC key:

CAPSLOCK -> CTRL LEFT CTRL -> ESC

It's not great, but it works. The last time I had to deal with a company who put the ESC key in a weird place was back in college where we have several of these HP Apollo/720 keyboards:

https://alum.wpi.edu/~tfraser/Machines/hpapollo720.jpg

:-)

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