These are design decisions which were built in eons ago; there was a valid reason for it that was explained to me once but I forget now. Anyway, there is this

These are design decisions which were built in eons ago; there was a valid reason for it that was explained to me once but I forget now. Anyway, there is this in the default vimrc: " Professor VIM says '87% of users prefer jj over esc', jj abrams strongly disagrees inoremap jj <Esc><Right> So you can use jj (or any other mapping) instead of Esc and get the behaviour you want.