I have twenty... seven, Jesus. Twenty seven years of muscle memory with VI. The only keyboard I can't 'vote with my feet' on is the built-in one on my laptop. As a result I'm hardly ever using my laptop untethered now. I don't think I've ever owned a keyboard I've typed less on than the touchbar macbook. Which means I'm barely using them as laptops, which is a little depressing.
Other people argue that all real vimmers use ctrl-[ instead of escape.
Edit: This is on a 2015 macbook pro, that still has the physical function keys. I almost never use the physical escape key, just capslock instead.
It's probably largely a relic from typewriters when it was originally something of a mechanical necessity and then made more sense than today in the context of filling out forms etc.
But TBH, I use so many different systems these days that I pretty much just accept that keyboard layouts and keyboard feel are going to differ from machine to machine and there's no point fussing about it.
Personally I'm in the Caps to Ctrl and use Ctrl-[ for escape camp. Works in my shell, REPLs and in my database clients and anywhere else with a readline interface that isn't Vim.
Even with that I still want a physical escape key.
She specifically mentioned vim users as one of the reasons for bringing back the escape key
Pretty sure Apple employees are locked into heavy NDAs (like many others in tech).
The episode was released this morning, after the embargo lifted.
Not only is [ always in the same spot, but you don't have to move your fingers off the normal keys or stretch. I was fortunate that a friend told me about that early on, otherwise I couldn't have handled VI, the stretching is so inconvenient (especially so on those old IBM PS/2 keyboards with cubic keys).
Only if it's the same keyboard layout. For instance, on the US layout, [ is immediately to the right of P, while on the ABNT-2 layout, it's two keys to the right of P. Meanwhile, ESC is on the same place (top left of the keyboard) in both.
map! jj <Esc>
inoremap jk <Esc>
The biggest downside to jk/kj mapping is that words that end with k are somewhat common. So a few times a week I will type something like "splunk" and want to exit insert mode immediately so I mash jk/kj after the k. 50% of the time the j is first so I end up with "splun" (kj is <esc>) (k moves up since we're in normal mode now).
This is why I use `jj` instead of `jk`/`kj` -- as a native English speaker in a job where everyone primarily speaks English, there are few cases where I'd be writing code with a `jj` naturally in a string.
The advantage I found of jk over jj is that, in normal mode, jk is a no-op, so if I hit jk as Escape when I was already in normal mode, it doesn't matter.
The only problem is that when I'm editing text out of Vim, I end up with the occasional jk at the end of my typing. That almost happened while writing this comment.
1. it cancels any modifiers on the insert command
2. it won't trigger any abbreviations
3. it doesn't work with visual-block insert
4. it bypasses InsertLeave autocommands
Counterpoint: modal editing is a poor substitute for several reasons ;)
:imap <tab> <esc>Developers with a new MBP manage by changing Caps Lock Key to Escape. Less pinky travel too.
If you need caps, you can download Karabiner and move caps to something else. I changed mine to pressing both Shift buttons.
I disagree. If you are a even modestly decent programmer you know to configure autoindentation so that you never need the tab key for anything. I cannot imagine a scenario where I would need the tab key in insert mode (except a very fringe case where I need to enter a tab character in a literal string and for some reason there are no escapes like \t. But then again you can still ^V^I)
you only need to press ENTER (to create a newline) and BACKSPACE (to exit the current block). You never need to press TAB
I use Caps less than I use Tab like for switching programs.
Whatever works for you.
Hopefully this trend continues and they can iterate on this model even further.