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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

As a Vim user: no physical escape key, no deal. I've recently tried working on one of these, and the bar is really annoying for another reason: as you switch between apps it keeps changing right in the corner of your vision, distracting from what's going on on the screen. WTF were they thinking?

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As a Vim user, just do what any sane man would do and rebind caps lock to escape. Much better.

what's a good way for vim to have that when you ssh into a remote box? Would you do the rebinding in the Terminal app or something, agent forwarding or something similar? I ssh into newly provisioned boxes regularly to edit some config files so I'd need something that works not just locally...

The remap is at the OS level, so if you remap caps lock to control or escape, that's what your machine will send over SSH when you press it. No need to change for every terminal app you use.

Standard key mappings are performed by the OS of the computer to which your keyboard is connected (either physically or via bluetooth or some such). When you press caps lock, the OS sees a caps lock keypress, but any application programs on your computer, including terminal, will see only an ESC keypress. Terminal will dutifully send the ESC press to the ssh program running in Terminal, which in turn should send it along to the remote host into which you are ssh'd.

I was also of this mind but I'm really pleased with the workaround of mapping Caps Lock to Escape (more ergonomic when using Escape) and mapping Left Shift + Right Shift to Caps Lock when pressed simultaneously. I use Karabiner-Elements (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/document.html) to implement these remaps in addition to some others such as Shift + Delete/Backspace for forward delete.

Seconded, though I also make my caps lock function as control when held down: https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/remap-caps-lock-to-escape-and-...

The problem with this is this is just one of half a dozen other computers I'd be using. I see no reason whatsoever to remap anything to anything after paying nearly $4K for the privilege. It should adapt to the way I've been doing things for the past 25 years, and intend to continue for 25 more.

This. FWIW, I have mapped some perma nent functions (brightness,volume etc) to the touchbar (you can do that from the preferences), so it doesn't keep changing based on the application in focus. This is a work laptop so I am stuck :(

I get it, but also please map capslock to escape, your pinky will thank you for it

I remapped my computer to Thinkpad X1 Carbon running Linux instead.

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