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It's not just VIM and NeoVIM where one can find the escape key commonly used.

One can drive GUIs with keyboards to an extent, including the escape key to cancel dialogues and pop-up/drop-down menus. This is true for many full-screen TUIs too, including orthodox file managers for starters.

Nearly 40 years of muscle memory with Emacs. I often use ALT for meta, but sometimes forget, and it's jarring.

vim?

You can map caps-lock to escape to reduce travel but some HN folks turned me on to the idea of avoiding it altogether: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

I map Caps-lock to Ctrl, purely so I stop hitting it by accident. It works well, I find myself using it as CTRL often.

THEN I Use someone eLSEs keyboarD AND...

I've never used ESC in vim. I learned ^[ first, and it's less travel.