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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

I didn't like that option, because I found I tend to hold Ctrl to do some action (maybe copy text from some panel), and if I change my mind and release it, the ESC might close the window I'm looking at.

It's happened more than once with Chrome's Inspector or in the shell. It would be even worse with Emacs in terminal mode, where ESC is a prefix key.

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If it could be OK for you other than that, there is usually a timeout setting that can be applied before it is recognised as a press.

    For example, any press under 200ms is ESC, anything over will register as Ctrl.   The timeout can be adjusted to work and not capture that time that you press it but then decide you don't want it.

You can limit the remapping to certain applications, in my case Emacs, IntelliJ, and VS Code. Doesn't help if you want to run the editor in a terminal, though.

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