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 "~")