I just remapped caps lock to esc and my woes (and left pinky pain) went away.

Every professional vi/vim user I know does not use the Escape key.

How do they escape input mode?

By mapping escape to the otherwise useless caps lock key

Well, due to a bug in a specific version of vi, holding the space-bar for a few seconds causes the laptop to overheat. I bought an external thermometer that connects via USB, and I have a daemon that monitors it to notice the overheating and send the ESC key to the application.

Look. I thought it was funny too, but at least put a link so you're not just stealing the joke.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Ctrl-[

There are many ways:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key

I remap the sequence 'j-k' to esc. It provides really fast exiting of insert mode and leaves you on the home row to navigate after.

C-c. Easier for some reason.

Ctrl+c is technically not quite the same as Esc: it doesn't trigger InsertLeave autocmds, and doesn't finish abbreviations. But as long as you don't have those you'll be fine.

I haven't tried it on a Mac, because I normally use a PC, but there Ctrl+[ is equivalent to Esc and saves reaching upwards (some PC laptops have badly placed Esc too.) I've been using Ctrl+[ ever since I discovered it.

Don’t you attach a keyboard and monitor for your daily work anyways?

The MBP keyboard buttons aren’t too great for typing all day every day.

Which is another part of the problem in marketing an extremely expensive device for Professional users...

Same pretty much. Got a mac because it's Unix, awesome hardware, good battery life and never fails to sleep and wake.

Don't care about the touchbar and it's never bothered me.

Uh, no? I mean, the software you write _may_ be the reason, but it's in no way implied by the fact that you're a "vi user", I've ran fairly large pieces of software from old MacBooks with little problem, though _yes_, I did some data mining stuff that would kill the poor little things - but not every "vi user" ever does that. In the largest deployment I've worked with even Vi would be ran via SSH on a remote VM.

It's when you bring out Photoshop or (gasp!) Blender or Unity, or doing something else that requires serious memory, when things start getting dicey. It's a specific sort of professional they mean, otherwise almost every employed person would fit.

Funny that you need a $3000 laptop to run vi. Funny in a sad way.

Just because they work in vi as their text editor does not mean they do not run other software on the same laptop. There are fields of software development where performance of your development environment matters.

The $3000 laptop runs the VMs that execute the software that's being built and configured using vi.

Emacs believer here, but the same applies: it's not the editor, it's the supporting software. Like local instances of the project you're working on. Compilers. Web browsers. More web browsers in various team working crap you might need to be using (though I stick to using web versions of stuff like Slack; downloading them as apps is just pure waste of memory and compute). Videoconferencing for remote work. Etc.

Having to "touch" a completely different surface to press escape sounds absolutely awful. Unless there's a way to swap escape for a real key that you don't need I would consider that machine defective.

Ctrl+[ is more ergonomic anyways. After I started using that, I realized how much I hated using Esc for anything.

There's a builtin toggle to map the capslock key to escape.

Not that that makes the touchbar good, but at least you can remove a useless key in favor of a useful one.

Capslock isn't entirely useless. I have mapped my capslock key to control but I still have access to it via a function key and do use it occasionally. Why do you think capslock is useless?

Because on the very rare occasion in which I want to capitalize more than one word, I can either hold shift, use tab-completion, or highlight in my editor and switch case.