I highly recommend not using the Esc key, remap to jk or caps lock that you can reach without moving your hands. It makes a pretty big difference.

Even easier to use the default Ctrl + [ instead of ESC.

I've somehow gotten in the habit of using ^C for Escape. Guess it feels natural from using it in Bash to restart typing my command or to kill a program.

Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5030164/whats-the-differe...

That's not equivalent...

Easier than editing a config file, but not easier than hitting jk or kj. Just take the second to map it.

The reason I'm so reluctant to remap it is that I use vim in a gadjillion different environments, and I don't want to have to worry about managing .vimrc everywhere. Or is it _vimrc? Especially under Windows, when I have cygwin and msys2 both installed, keeping .vimrc synchronized is terrible. I'm more inclined to adopt ^[, since that should work anywhere, even in vi.

This. Hitting that wall when you're hacking on a file and discover after the fact that your fancy keybind remap isn't on this machine and now it's doing something weird...

Customizations are baggage. I try to minimize them as much as I can, even if it means being a little less efficient on my home system. A side effect is that if a program doesn't have sane defaults I'm not likely to use it, even if it can be made to work better with some tweaking.

I don't go much beyond :syntax on and :set si with Vim.

Fair enough I suppose. I fall back on ctrl-[ if I'm in another environment, but it's rare enough for me to not care about it being an untrained motion.