Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

For vi-heads: ":" The key combo that puts you into command mode. M is "meta", which is Alt on PC or Cmd on Mac.

That is incorrect. In vi and vim, "ESC" is the key that puts you into command mode (from insert mode). Command mode is the full-screen visual mode where you enter commands by a sequence of keypresses.

":" is the key which issues "ex" commands. vi and ex are two different modes of the same editor. Any command which begins with a colon is an ex command, not a vi command, not done in "Command Mode".

True. ":" is the rough equivalent to M-x, though.

Also worth mentioning is Q , which puts you in ex mode, essentially just ":" prompts one after the other until you exit or issue a "vi" command to go (back) to visual mode.

And then there's open mode, but vim doesn't implement that.

These are all conventions and you can change them, but I'm used to Meta = Opt and Super = Cmd on macOS.

Does that interfere with your being able to use Opt for typing key combos to produce Unicode codepoints that aren't usually found on a "standard" keyboard for your country? E.g., accented characters not found in your country's majority language, Greek letters when you don't have a Greek keyboard, mathematical symbols, and so on? It's been a couple decades since I owned a Mac, and I love Linux's Compose key feature, but I remember that Option+key shortcuts were really good for typing a wide variety of commonly-used Unicode codepoints. How does setting Meta = Opt work with that for you?

It does, yes. It's a reasonable trade-off for me becaues it's rare that I need to do that and if I do, I use [digraph]s in (neo)vim. The alternatives are usually more disruptive for me, (using Cmd as Meta shadows way more commonly used OS-level shortcuts, using Esc as Meta shadows Escape in Vim, and other TUIs).

[digraph]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/digraph/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com