This way I can use all the default US-based shortcuts for emacs/vim/... while still being able to easily type the special chars for my native language, e.g. pressing AltGr+o results in 'ö'.
This method is slightly inconvenient for typing long texts but for me it's still the perfect solution to such problems.
Examples:
ä - AltGr+" a (the double quote looks visiually like 2 dots)
ç - AltGr+, c
õ - AltGr+~, o
and so on. I found this solution very practical, even if quite late in my life (went from German QWERTZ, to French AZERTY, to end up with QWERTY), because QWERTY is available everywhere, even if I have to work remote through Windows computers, and it is much much friendlier than AZERTY/QWERTZ. Additionally it gives me to write with the same layout German, French, Portuguese, etc. And it is very easy to remember how to get the accents, because the used signs are visually close.
But anyway, EurKEY would be a sane standard in Europe, instead of the hellish borderline-inusable national standard keyboards...
For every shortcut you can imagine you can find at least one keyboard layout out there where it's inconvenient.
Just get over the crappy nationalized keyboard layouts and use US English keyboards like all programmers do!
I can type French + English + Romanian just fine and comfy (would also work for Spanish + Italian fine, northern languages might be a bit of an issue...), with all the accents and special chars of each language, on a US-English layout keyboard that also has `[` and ``` (backtricks) and all the 0-9 numbers available one keystroke away. Mac keyboards work fine by default, the Windows ones might ned fiddling around with picking US vs US-Intenational and windows quote character settings until you get it right.
Western European keyboard layouts (except British) are just plain broken imo, you can't need more than one key to type a damn `[` (array access), or force ppl to use Shift to type numbers, wtf.
Otoh, typing Lisp code on a French keyboards is kinda' cool in a way :P
Does anyone actually like Caps Lock?
so emails and general writing tend to be all lower case and rely on the editor to upcase for me. mostly works.
What I have found even more useful is triggering a "layer" when Caps Lock is held down, which turns H, J, K, & I into an arrow cluster; U & O into Page Up / Down; and P & ; into Home / End. To toggle regular Caps Lock, I just activate the layer and then hit A. It's a big time saver! :)
That's one of the most commonly used shortcuts I use. Not just in vim, but also in the shell. When I screw up on my typing, the mistake is often 3 or more letters back. Instead of hitting backspace a lot or moving the cursor and retyping mid-word, I prefer to say "screw it", hit Ctrl-w, and retype the word. It's faster. My brain is just not optimized to type pieces of words. I can't use muscle memory then.
Besides that, I don't know about you or dmitryminkovsky, but I remapped it to Caps system-wide, so by remapping to Ctrl, I'd be losing a lot more than those shortcuts you mentioned. On the other hand, CapsLock has always been a useless key to me. When I want to type in all-caps, it's less confusing/error-prone to just hold Shift with my pinky while typing. Also, Caps is in a much easier place to hit than Ctrl, so it's more fitting for a key that I hit a lot.
* Ctrl if held and used with other keys.
* Esc if pressed and released on its own.
There's no reason to press and release Ctrl on its own (minus games), and you never need to chord Esc with anything else, so they can both live on the same key.
Tell me about it!
> Mapping it to Ctrl is a much more sensible choice.
Never considered this, but just moved my pinkie to Ctrl and then to Esc and then to Ctrl... hmm... I use Emacs bindings in Insert Mode, wouldn't this interfere with them?
Added bonus: on MacOS, emacs keybindings work in pretty much every place where you can input text, so you get’em everywhere. It’s part of the Cocoa Text System:
Vim would be a particularly good editor since most operations are simple and elegant with only an occasional exit of insert mode.
but emacs... probably not as fun.