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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

I love this take. I was a die-hard Vim/Neovim zealot... but these days I absolutely love the ecosystem of tools that support normal mode. For so long hand-cramping emacs keybindings were sort-of-standard-in-a-few-places.

If you're not convinced vimming is the best way to interact with your editor, you probably haven't seen a really proficient vimmer.

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And meanwhile in every thread or article about vim, it is very rare to mention remapping Caps Lock to Escape (or the other lesser IMHO lesser options ) even though one third of user do it. The other two third are deluded tool fetishists that are ready to suffer that their most important key is the furthest away from the home of row because "you get used to it" even if that's just an unfortunate historical accident. I would have not stuck to vim at all if not for this one trick and I suspect that's the main reason behind many dropouts

LOL this made me chuckle. :)

I always remap caps to ctrl because ctrl-[ is an acceptable escape key for me as I like to use other insert mode shortcuts. Eg ctrl-h, ctrl-m, ctrl-k etc.

I know some people map to escape/ctrl when held but that usually means installing something like Karabiner.

Well then you should mention it when talking about vim to non-vimmers as not to leave them in the dark with the defaults. The question is not what solution you found to avoid the Escape key but that you did.

And even though you are probably used to your solution having the most important key in your program be a weird combo is not great imho. And you are missing out on bash/zsh/gdb and other command line vim modes.

> And you are missing out on bash/zsh/gdb and other command line vim modes.

I'm not at all, ctrl-[ is a terminal thing. It's available everywhere as are the the other ctrl shortcuts I mentioned.

Funny I had tried it in wezterm before writing my comment and I get ^] ...

> it is very rare to mention remapping Caps Lock to Escape

I change mine to Ctrl. This way escape for me is Ctrl + [. Ctrl is too useful to be in an awkward position.

I have mapped Caps Lock to both Ctrl and Escape simultaneously. If you just tap it it's Escape and if you hold it down it's Ctrl, and it's easy to accomplish with xcape.

I actually usually hit my Ctrl with the base of the pinky (ie: pad/palm of the hand) in a lot of cases.

Pinky sideways is an akward position, Ctrl would be better remapped to a thumb-accessible key

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