4 ms·
IMO making it a control key is a better choice (I tried both at some point) because chording with awkward keys is worse than just pressing them, and the control
by boomlinde 7y ago
IMO making it a control key is a better choice (I tried both at some point) because chording with awkward keys is worse than just pressing them, and the control keys are placed awkwardly on most keyboards. Since you can end insertion mode with ^[ you then have a pretty comfortable chord that doesn't stray far from the home row to replace the escape key.
I had a tool on a mac that would make caps lock equivalent to escape if it was pressed and released alone, and control if it was chorded. Sounded great on paper but I underestimated how often i press control before realizing I don't want to perform a chord.
- neonroku 7y agoKarabiner Elements is great for doing this kind of remapping on macOS https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ The equivalent for Windows would probably be AutoHotkey https://www.autohotkey.com/ https://www.autohotkey.com/
- Tsiklon 7y agoOS X can natively set Caps Lock (or any of the other modifiers) to CTRL,ALT,CMD,Esc,Caps. in the Keyboard Pref Pane at least as of 10.13. Of course Karabiner can do quite a bit more than that. But if you can't or don't want to install more software it's a choice available to you.
- joeldo 7y agoThat's an interesting idea as well. I've always found reaching for the 'Esc' key to be more awkward than the 'ctrl' key, but undoubtedly I use the 'ctrl' key more often than the 'esc' key outside of Vim, so perhaps the sheer volume of use would make it worth it.
- zipperhead 7y agoMake it both! From http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-make-that-caps-lock-key-useful/ http://www.economyofeffort.com/2014/08/11/beyond-ctrl-remap-... xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape;Control_L=Escape;Control_R=Escape'