7 ms·
It's funny to think of how standardized keyboards are within the US today, and yet it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't even count on the arrow keys being in
by chimeracoder 15y ago
It's funny to think of how standardized keyboards are within the US today, and yet it wasn't so long ago that you couldn't even count on the arrow keys being in the same place (or in fact, being there at all - which is why you have hjkl on Vim to this day.
On the other hand, the computers at Bell Labs had an arrow key, which is why R (which is based on S) uses '<-' for assignment, as the two-character combination was enabled for compatibility reasons.
And on a related note, I can't imagine how people use Vim without rebinding ESC to Caps_Lock. Given that ESC used to be where TAB currently is (and the latter is too useful to be removed), I don't really see a point in keeping the obsolescent Caps_Lock, especially when it's so irritating to keep moving the hand to the furthest corner of the keyboard.
- cahrens 15y agoI usually swap the left ctrl and the Caps lock keys, mostly out of habit from the first computer I used (An actual computer, with the Magnetic Tape spools and punch-card boot loader). I have also dealt with crappy tiny keyboards that don't even have any keys beyond the standard chunk (So no function keys, 10-key, or arrows / browsing control)
- tesseract 15y agoAs a frequent vim user I probably should have done the caps-as-esc remap but by now caps-as-control is so engrained in my muscle memory that I now have a significant friction to changing it. My favorite keyboard happens to be the Apple Extended Keyboard II, but I can't use one these days because its caps key would physically toggle between on and off states (like a typewriter caps key) which means it does not make a very good candidate for remapping.
- prewett 15y agoCtrl-[, which turns out to be ESC, is one solution. Given that many people like to remap CapsLock to Ctrl, it might give you the best of both worlds.