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Comment by m000 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what's the purpose of this remapping?

Is this for MacBook Pro models with a Touch Bar, or is it something else altogether? In the former case, a better title would be "Map Escape to Caps Lock".

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I use vim, so esc is one of the most important keys. But I use esc in most apps very frequently. I don’t use Caps Lock at all.

I still don't get it. We have a keyboard with an Esc key and a Caps Lock key. Why would I remove Caps Lock and use it as another Esc key?

Try pressing esc every few seconds for 8-12hrs a day like a vim developer does and you'll know.

(Single datapoint ahead.)

I edit my sources and remote configs exclusively in vim-likes since ~2004 (full time sw dev) and never experienced such issues. From my experience, typing or clicking speed requirement rarely exceeds that of thinking on your program. I hit esc often, but not too often, and it is not too far.

I’m not against caps->esc mapping in general, but for me this would have little to no value plus non-standard layout, which is minus, since I’m not office-only guy.

Inverse: question you have a big key, in the home row. That is a very valuable keyboard position.

What is a function in your programs deserve such a prominent position??

In my case as an emacs user bloq mayus, get's remaped to CTRL.

Vin users need ESC.

I don't understand it either. I have mapped caps lock to some command launcher/window switcher, which spares me pressing two keys.. Esc is even on the same side as the keyboard..

Rofi: https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

> I don't understand it either [...] Esc is even on the same side as the keyboard

Put your hands on the keyboard home row (where they belong).

Try to reach esc without taking them out of there. Hurts, don't it?

Now try reaching caps lock. Much better, right?

That's why.

Caps lock is useless. Esc is extremely useful (for vi users). So we get rid of caps lock and put something more useful there.

I don’t use vim as often (~20%), so I’ve mapped caps lock to Esc, and Esc to AltGr — which doesn’t exist in EN-Int layout. The benefit is that I can assign AltGr+{1,2,3,4...} as quick contextual hotkeys without overriding any default combos.

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