> Besides, no one who uses Vim is gonna be happy to see the physical Esc key go away.

What kind of self-respecting Vim user physically reaches up to the top corner of their keyboard constantly?

Even if you have a physical esc key up there you should be hitting ctrl-[ or remaping it onto the capslock. It's wasted motion to constantly pull off home row to hit escape.

Haha, I said the same thing to an emacs buddy who was expressing concerns about vim users, he sounded pissed that real Vim users don't use ESC, or even hjkl keys.

I do for one. I have capslock mapped to Ctrl. Of course, I started in EMACS and got sucked into vim and had already gotten used to the capslock as Ctrl.

I think putting ctrl on the capslock key is the more efficient move, honestly. But Vi was designed for a machine that had esc where your tab is. It's built for efficiency but you lose all of it when you have to physically pull your whole hand up off of the home row.

The Vim wiki has a lot of tips for more efficient mappings[1], but if you don't want to be dependent on your own idiosyncratic config, ctrl-[ is literally the keycode that the physical esc key generates, and it's soooo much easier to hit there's no reason not to retrain your muscle memory to prefer it.

[1] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

Why choose? When I hold down caps lock, it acts like CTRL. When I hit it once, it acts like ESC.

Got a tool that will do that on os x sierra? I used to us karabiner, but that's hosed by the updated until they can get elements cleaned up.

Have you tried Karabiner-elements[0]? I haven't used OS X the past few years, so I don't know if it actually works, but somebody suggested it on reddit.

[0]: https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements

I have, it's not quite there yet ... I've been a fan of Karabiner since I first switched to mac.

People who use Vim usually re-map caps-lock to ESC at a minimum, and possibly other uses. Mine is esc by itself, ctrl with any other key.

I do remap the function bar right now, though. That will take some getting used to.

I remap caps lock to ctrl, since the ctrl key is also necessary for the command line, and the one on a Mac keyboard is in a painfully awkward location.

And remapping your vim shortcuts is great - when you're not constantly logging in to new instances or (don't ask) sharing logins with co-workers.

As I posted in another thread, I think it may actually be fine to have a different "feel" (touch vs physical) for escape, which is a very special key for us vim users (assuming you don't have it remapped).

I keep seeing posts about remapping but I honestly don't get it why users should be forced to hacks and compromises to replace functionality which had no reason to be removed in the first place.

It's not really for a compromise. I think caps is a much more useful button when remapped. For how often it's used, it should be in a more home-row centric location.