How do I get the behaviour of the 'Insert' key on VIM using a Macbook Pro without an insert key?

Question

Because the apple store couldn't help me, and indeed had never seen VIM before, despite the fact it comes installed as standard on OSX ;-).

Answer 1

Either use Mac's onscreen keyboard or use a hotkey program to rebind one of your existing keys to Insert. One Superuser thread provides several Autohotkey equivalents for Mac such as Quicksilver.

Answer 2

you can use 'i' instead of insert

Answer 3

With iTerm or iTerm2 you can map an unused key to insert. For example, I've mapped F19 to "send escape sequence" [2~ (that's the xterm escape sequence for the insert key).

In iTerm2, go to preferences, "Bookmarks", select the "Keyboard" tab, click the "+", press the key you want to map, select action "send escape sequence" and then enter [2~.

Answer 4

Taken from here:

Toggling insert mode

Press Ctrl-Space to start and to stop insert mode (the same suggestion using Shift-Space is above):

nnoremap i imap

Or you may prefer to map Ctrl-Space to a rather than i so that repeatedly pressing Ctrl-Space does not move the cursor back (remember that pressing I allows you to insert a character at the beginning of the line):

nnoremap a imap

You would put this in your .vimrc so it happens on start-up.

Answer 5

Surely you can just do a simple:

inoremap <C-l> <Insert>

I can't say I've ever had to use replace mode enough that <Esc>R wasn't quick enough for me.