I hit Esc without looking all the time. It's how I dismiss modals. I foresee a good deal of ` in my future.

I have also learned to find the keyboard backlight brightness keys in pitch darkness.

I hit Esc without looking about 500 times a day. As does nearly every Vim user in existence, I imagine.

s/day/hour

To be honest, my ratio is probably more like 750/hour, considering that I do 100% of my work in terminal windows, use nvim as my main code editor, use a tiling window manager (whose keybindings include escape for some sequences), use mutt for email, newsbeuter for rss feeds, weechat for irc…

I just didn't want to seem overly hyperbolic in my original post :)

Haha, yeah - 500/day definitely seemed low to me

^[ will change your life -- you don't have to move your left hand up to hit the escape key!

I've considered it, but I've spent the last ~10 years of my life learning and using Vim with esc ingrained into my brain. I've managed to retrain some combinations by sheer force of will and major effort, but I think I might be too far down the rabbit hole for Esc.

I've been trying out jj as escape, but I keep forgetting to use it.

IMO that's a terrible escape sequence.

I agree for the most part. But on the Mac keyboard the Escape key is tiny and way off the home row. C-[ is awkward and there's only a small control key in the left side so I miss it all the time (my pinkies aren't good at hitting the right key for some reason.)

I've remapped Caps Lock to Control and that's working out better.

Not a vim user (but I know how to use it-ish). The escape key as the key in vim always struck me as an odd choice, ergonomically.

Of course, I've mapped ctrl to the caps lock key, so...

The original vi was created on a keyboard that had Esc in the place where CapsLock now lives (on a standard US or UK English 104-key keyboard)

The original `vi` was written on an ADM-3A terminal. If you have a look at the keyboard layout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#/media/File:KB_Terminal...

You can not only see why Esc was easy to hit, but also the arrow keys (and, in common with other terminals of the time, why "home" is "~")

Why would anyone use Esc over CapsLock?

Because they've mapped CapsLock to CTRL?

They should map both Control and Escape to Caps Lock. Control when combined with other key or held for longer than 250 ms, and Escape when pressed and released within 250 ms.

That's awesome, I had no idea you could do that. MacOS Sierra? Doesn't appear to be present in El Capitan Modifier keys - or is it a third party utility?

Can do it using Karabiner (https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/).

Sadly doesn't support Sierra properly yet.

The original blog post that introduced me to this setup describes macOS setup: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#cont...

On X11, https://github.com/alols/xcape just run `xcape -t 350 -e 'Control_L=Escape'`

On Windows, AutoHotkey: https://github.com/myfreeweb/dotfiles/blob/32c9cfd8d5e0a3a2c...

Check out ControllerMate. It lets you remap anything with complex logic.

plenty of games use ESC in input options as an exit out of selection. "Press key to bind or ESC to cancel", with your solution I would end up with unwanted CTRL binds

I don’t see how. Do 250 ms pass quicker when you’re in a game?

But ctrl is FIRE! Well, it was until games started to suck.

Honestly. Can't really think of when I use escape to give a real answer. I think I could hit it without looking, but I don't think I hit escape that often. Or maybe I use it all the time and won't notice until it's gone.

But yeah. If ^[ or caps lock mapping is not an option, and your workflow requires a lot of escape presses, it could be annoying to have to look down to hit it.

Get out of a dialog quicky. Get out of the OS popup (e.g. File save). Get out of the current context in your editor/IDE (e.g. Search etc) Cancel something. Cmd+esc takes you to the previous up from cmd+tab (instead of cmd+shift+tab). Ever wanted to cancel drag and drop?!

Honestly the Esc key is indispensible.

> Cmd+esc takes you to the previous up from cmd+tab

I've always used cmd+~ for that

exactly -- vim users who haven't transitioned to ^[ hit it all the time

Also, this looks to me like yet another not-particularly-useful tentpole 'feature' when I really wish they would spend some quality time fixing abundant os and finder bugs.

Why transition to a double key combo rather than use CapsLock as Esc? The other quite useful "universal" key is the § key on a European mac keyboard (which is for some insane reason just under Esc where ` normally would be)

Because your fingers stay in the normal location. To hit escape, I have to either lift my left hand or rotate sharply at the wrist.

Yes, but you capslock is more accessible than the ctrl key in my opinion. I quite like the option to remap capslock to both ctrl (when used with another key) and to esc when pressed alone, that was suggested in other comments.

I only use it for escaping from a full screen view on youtube

I'm thinking it'll be rad to map the entire bar to escape for vim use.

What about ctrl + c?

If I understand your suggestion, ctrl+c doesn't work in all the contexts where I use escape (modal dialogs, editor autocomplete popups, etc).