Reaching up to hit the escape key sucks (especially in vim).

Question

Escape is almost as important as the enter key, used universally for "cancel". In vim, it's arguably more important than the space bar, making its location highly suboptimal.

What key remappings -- either globally (for the whole operating system) or just within vim -- or other solutions do folks have for this problem?

I'll include things I've tried as separate answers.

ADDED: I guess it sounds crazy, maybe especially to people with bigger hands than me or something, but, yeah, it's much easier to hit TAB or CAPSLOCK in succession with other keys than ESC. For non-vim users who don't believe this could be an issue, here's an experiment: Type out a sentence and see how long it takes. Now type it again but with ESC in place of every SPACE. That's how much worse vim is without some kind of remapping.

Speaking of which, if I had a keyboard with a split space bar, remapping the left half of the space bar to ESC might be ideal (I guess I'd have to try it to know though).

Note that one reason many of us like vim is that you can edit and move around without ever taking your hands away from the home row (like for the arrow keys). The placement of ESC somewhat undermines that advantage.

Answer 1

One solution is to swap ESC and CAPSLOCK. Unfortunately, Macs don't have a right CTRL key so in that case you really want to remap CAPSLOCK to CTRL. But if you have a keyboard with two CTRL keys, I recommend the following:

How to remap keys to swap ESC and CAPSLOCK:

For X Windows (X11):

Figure out which keycodes are actually mapped:
  xmodmap -pke | egrep -i "escape|caps_lock"
This will print out something like:
  keycode 66 = Caps_Lock
  keycode  9 = Escape
Based on that, swap them:
  xmodmap -e "clear lock"
  xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = Escape"
  xmodmap -e "keycode 9 = Caps_Lock"
  xmodmap -e "add Lock = Caps_Lock"
Add those four xmodmap commands to your ~/.xinitrc (or the global
  xinitrc) to set up your keys whenever you log in to X.

To do the same for the console, see: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO.html

To do the same under windows:

Get this file: http://yootles.com/outbox/remap.txt. Go to start menu, run, and type:

regedit path\to\remap.txt

Answer 2

I got used to use Ctrl+[ instead of Esc, I find good enough for me. However it's also good to have an actual use of the Capslock key...

Answer 3

Putting the following in your .vimrc makes TAB work like ESC:

imap <tab> <esc>

This is fine as long as you never need to insert literal tabs in insert mode. Better would be to actually swap TAB and ESC in vim, but I don't know how to do that.

Answer 4

Remapping escape to SHIFT+SPACE

map! <S-space> <esc>

But why? Remapping makes you get used to non standard behavior which can be surprising when you are on production systems (or worse - on production systems at client site!). Not a good idea IMHO.

Answer 5

For VIM (at least; didn't try the original vi), you don't need ESC; you can use CTRL-C to exit insert modes.

Answer 6

Yeah, <C-[> is actually a very good idea. Especially when you have your Ctrl mapped to CapsLock, so your fingers are on the home row all the time.

Answer 7

I remaped "jj" to escape. It's very nice once you get used to it (if you're using QWERTY):

ino jj <esc>
cno jj <c-c>

For visual mode, I just use "v" to toggle it on & off:

vno v <esc>

Answer 8

In windows, you can use this nifty app: Key tweak to remap keys for all apps. I created a custom dvorak / vim set, and everything just flows from my fingers. The downside is that nobody else can now use my keyboard :)

Answer 9

I have small hands and this bothers me a lot as well. I switched to a Happy Hacking Keyboard which has the ESC key right above the tab key. I love the small size, but my co-workers hate typing on it.

Answer 10

I've swapped Caps Lock and Esc at the OS level.

Answer 11

With the standard Ubuntu desktop, go through the menus: System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts tab. Then hit the "Layout Options" button, click on the triangle next to "Caps Lock key behaviour" and select "Swap ESC and CapsLock".

Makes vim so much nicer :)

Answer 12

The solution I've been using for years is to map Caps Lock to Escape, i.e. to make Caps Lock behave as an Escape key. I've been following these directions. Basically, follow these steps:

1. Create a caps.reg file.

2. Stick the following into it.

   REGEDIT4

   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]

   "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,3a,00,46,00,01,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

3. Merge that file into the registry.

4. Reboot. (At least I've always had to reboot on Windows XP for the change to take effect.)

Answer 13

why not try imap jj . That way you don't have to move your fingers from the keys ;-)