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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

> A proper Unix keyboard layout must have escape next to 1 and control next to A.

I don't get it, why is this a hard requirement?

It's how almost most keyboards were until the later IBM PC layout became most common in the early 90s.

Home computers from Apple, Atari, Amiga, pretty much all Unix workstations, Macs up until the late 80s, the Acorn machines. They all had Control next to A. Ok, except for the VIC-20/C64 which had it next to... Q.

Because caps-locks doesn't need prime real estate. It's barely needed. But control is used constantly, especially on Unix machines.

The escape position, that I'm less rigid about.

The Amiga had Caps Lock next to A.

I've actually come to like Ctrl where it is on PCs. As it's in the corner, it's nice and easy to hit. I can sit my little finger on whichever one is convenient, then carry on typing much as normal, even using the same hand. Ctrl+Shift is also no problem.

Don't know what I'd put in caps lock's place. I don't actually think it's a particularly good location for a meta key. Maybe it'd be good for backspace? I don't really make enough mistakes for the current backspace location to be a problem.

Ah, Amiga was one of those weirdos with both caps locks and ctrl over there. But you could still hit ctrl with a pinky over there, as god intended.

I map ctrl to capslocks, but also leave the ctrl where pc104 has it as well.

I suspect because (some?) computer terminals had the escape key there, e.g. VT-100 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/vt100.html

Contrast this with, say, a typewriter that would have no use for ESC.

Would really screw up my tilde muscle memory.

Vim reasons I'm guessing

Maybe but I strongly recommend Ctrl-[ instead. Life changing.

I finally learned that trick when I spent a lot of time typing on an iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard Folio. It doesn't have an escape key at all.

It bugged me terribly at first but I liked it once I was used to it.

Uf. Get a keyboard with a thumb cluster and put Esc there. I use vi bindings everywhere and not putting Esc on a an easy to reach key would be terrible.

If you want to have Escape in a good position, then the far top left is a really bad position, as is having Control on the caps lock position. But then to change that you'd need to reconsider the keyboard layout itself, which seems like a too big of a mental hurdle for most people.

Ctrl next to A pre-dates vi

You can remap the key combination "jk" to ESC in order to switch effortlessly from editing mode to normal mode.

    inoremap jk <esc>

("jk" doesn't normally appear in English and is easy to type)

I love this mapping.

Unfortunately 90% of vim interface implementations don't support it.

but in other languages you might be doomed

  $ aspell --lang=pl dump master | cut -d / -f 1 | fgrep jk | wc -l
   981

kj, jj, kk are common options as well.

Probably, but it's still an awful pinky stretch a gazillion times a day. I have escape on my thumb cluster. Easy to reach and utilizes the strong thumbs.

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