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I remapped caps lock to escape and it's been wonderful. The oversized caps lock key on keyboards is an inexplicably bad UI choice anyway.
by crusso 7y ago
I remapped caps lock to escape and it's been wonderful. The oversized caps lock key on keyboards is an inexplicably bad UI choice anyway.
- Tsiklon 7y agoPersonally I find a classic Unix layout to work best for me. I’ve mapped the caps lock key to CTRL. I use that far more than I ever use caps, it feels quite natural to me after about a week or two of adjustment.
- PascLeRasc 7y agoYou can use Karabiner Elements to configure your Caps Lock to act as Ctrl when held down, and escape when tapped alone. Best of both worlds.
- matttb 7y agoIn addition to this you can do something like mapping Shift+Caps Lock to be an actual Caps Lock toggle. Now you get 3 buttons for one and it works amazingly well.
- darkteflon 7y agoThis was a revelation when I discovered it earlier this year. I could never go back now, it’s so convenient.
- DogLover_ 7y agoThis argument as THE SOLUTION really needs to stop. As an example I mapped caps to ctrl a long time ago so this won't work without compromises.
- foldr 7y agoYou can use Karbiner to have a short press of caps lock map to escape and a long press to control. Works pretty good.
- fwip 7y agoYep - I have mine set to be control if pressed with other keys, and escape if pressed alone. Works for everything except if I'm playing a videogame that uses ctrl to crouch. 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.
- 2muchcoffeeman 7y agoI almost never use caps lock so I just mapped caps to esc and hold shift for all caps. The no escape thing doesn’t bother me anymore.
- qmmmur 7y agoIs there a guide on this?
- philwelch 7y agoCan you map ctrl to esc?
- hinkley 7y agoRight? The solution is 'make the fuckin keyboard work'. These are workarounds. 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.
- ghaff 7y ago>The oversized caps lock key on keyboards is an inexplicably bad UI choice anyway. 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.
- macintux 7y agoSun and Apple both used to have control in that spot. It was a sad day when they surrendered to the inferior PC keyboard layout.
- ghaff 7y agoI used to have really strong opinions about keyboards. I even still have a Northgate keyboard which was an "improved" version of the original IBM keyboard. (Which largely mirrored the Selectric.) 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.
- ghshephard 7y agoI haven't used a laptop, desktop, or other computer (windows/mac/Linux) in the last 15 years in which I didn't immediately configure Caps-Lock to be control within 5-minutes of setting up the system. So, to some degree - it's always been control for me.
- dublin 7y agoFWIW, early PC keyboard layouts had the Control key next to the "A", where God intended it to be, too. (Don't have the link handy, but there was a story posted here on HN in the past week or so about the history of the PC keyboard that showed this...)
- wyclif 7y agoTrue, and as a longtime fan of the IBM Model 'M' that had that configuration and was mechanical and built to last with buckling springs, I'm glad I can get one of these: https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/40PSA https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/40PSA
- ImprovedSilence 7y agoI remapped jk to escape. It’s easily my favorite remap, I don’t even bother with escape on full keyboards/desktops.
- Lio 7y agoThat's a bit of a pain if you put that into muscle memory and use other Vi interface software that can't be remapped. 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.
- goerz 7y agohow do you type "e_{ijk}"?
- L3viathan 7y agoFor example by typing: e_{ij<c-v>k}
- ImprovedSilence 7y agojk is a pretty rare combo to begin with, but when you do need it, just hitting j, and pausing for a second takes that input singularly, then you can type k safely. Slightly sub optimal, yes. But the benefits outweigh the negatives for me.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stevehawk 7y agoobligatory xkcd - https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/