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I don't find myself needing Esc very often in Vim. Then again, I do have jk mapped to Esc, and ;; maps to Esc: which is usually why I want to leave insert mode in the first place.

I have Caps Lock mapped to Alt instead, which pairs nicely with various app hotkeys (Alt+T for iTerm2, Alt+E for Sublime, Alt+S for Skype, Alt+Space to pop Alfred, etc), plus the Cmd+Alt+whatever bindings for various things.

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Moreover, pressing alt while in insert mode causes the next key to run as if pressed in normal mode. I usually use this instead of escape for those times when I don't want to go into command mode.

One caveat, however. I recently switch to OS X and have yet to figure out how to get alt/option to behave this way. Really my only major gripe about OS X vs. linux.

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