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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

By force of habit, when I wanted to close an IM window, I have typed

:q

Instead of switching to the mouse and hitting the "x". Then I had to explain to the person that I wasn't sticking my tongue out at them.

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I once wrote ":tabnew something.js" in my IM window and sent it before I realized that the wrong window had focus. The person replied with, "bash: :tabnew: command not found." I told him, "I was hoping you were vim, actually".

HA!

Also using vim will cause your escape key to be heavily hit constantly after typing anything especially if you are not sure what mode you are in, then only realizing you are not in vim period.

Oh god I do this so much it's getting to be painful.

ctrl+c is much better than esc :) but I use emacs more than vi[m]

Yeah -- more (keys) is always better!

Oh, wait . . .

I don't have esc bound to caps-lock so its a reach!

  inoremap jj <Esc>

We see a lot of ":q" messages in #vim.

I've hit Ctrl-W to try to delete a word, and ended up closing an IRC window. It's not exclusive to vim. :)

I've hit ctrl-w and closed a window while taking a test in class.

When I first switched to my Mac, when I'd switch between split windows (ctrl w w), I'd often accidentally close my Terminal session (command w). The Apple Command sat where I expected ctrl to be.

I've found it easy to avoid misusing Ctrl-w because of the fact I use it so much to close tabs in Firefox. You just need to have two different uses for something, both of which you use very regularly, to get used to not accidentally misusing them, I've found.

Vimperator will break that habit, for sure.

Alas, I think you may be right. I haven't been using it very long.

Once I actually buckled down and started learning how to use it, I was surprised by how quickly and easily a natural feeling of "this is how it should be" developed while using Vimperator. Of course, there's a lot of positive transference of knowledge from my heavy use of Vim itself, but still -- I didn't expect to find it this easy.

I think part of the reason may be that every single keyboard-driven browser I have ever used before (Lynx, W3m, Links, et cetera, ad infinitum) was so awful as a Web interface that I became convinced Web browsers were a uniquely GUI-suited type of application. Vimperator is definitely changing my mind.

Thank goodness.

OS X:

Put the following in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBindings.dict

{ "^w" = "deleteWordBackward:"; }

GTK:

echo 'gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"' >>~/.gtkrc-2.0

gconftool -t string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs

Windows:

... uh ...

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