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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

Bah, these entitled kids. I guess being old enough to remember keyboards before they had escape keys helps, but ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket. Read your ASCII table! C-[ is even a quicker type avoiding RSIs from all those long pinky reaches.

(More seriously, as much as it bothers me to retrain my pinky, most uses of the escape key would be many times better if the lefthand side of the touch bar had a word for the function, like stop being full screen, cancel, leave menu, or whatever. The function would then be discoverable instead of secret lore.)

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I had no idea you could use C-[ as ESC

It's also a kinda crappy alternative, because it's not possible on a large number of non-English keyboard. Ctrl+c is also an option, although I think there's a slight difference.

Yep, ctrl+c is different than esc

ESC is 0x1B, traditionally the CTRL key reset the two highest bit of the ASCII code, [ is 0x5B, if you reset the two highest bits of 0x5B you get 0x1B which is why ESC and CTRL-[ are the same thing.

CTRL-C is completely different.

I wonder how many vim users have tried using CTRL + [ for the first time today. Muscle memory being what it is I fully expect that nobody will swap over to this new and improved Apple way of pressing the Escape key.

And vi too - works just fine, but you have a valid point about muscle memory, which is pretty much the only kind of memory many of us have left when it comes to vi-like editors, since the key sequences disappeared from our brains decades ago!

Much to my surprise, after I was forced by circumstances to use Ctrl+[ for a month or so, I found I didn't actually want to go back to Esc.

Had it only been a week or two I suspect my muscle memory wouldn't've shifted though.

I am on Windows and it seems that not every program accepts C-[ as ESC. However Vim in Cygwin does accept it as ESC.

That is kind of cool! It is much easier to hit then ESC all the way up in the northwest corner of my keyboard.

What do you mean by that last line? Well for one thing the bar is customizable by each app, but still, from the examples, they show very clear icons of function.

This is already far superior than just F1, F2, etc, which are far far more cryptic than a descriptive icon.

That's the thing, most apps already do use F keys for custom bindings, but you have to manually memorize them for each different app. Here, you at least get to see the correct icon in each program you're using.

And as a bonus, you get variable size buttons, sliding input, colors, and much more that just isn't possible with simple buttons.

I use ␛ as the Meta key in Emacs. I just tried using C-[ instead. It works, but you have to press down both CTRL and [ at the same time; you can't flam CTRL and then [.

I am reminded also of one time trying to write C code on an IBM AS/400, only to find that the keyboard did not have square bracket keys at all...

A lot of non-command-line developer apps use Escape though, like all Jetbrain's IDEs.

What are the odds that someone at JetBrains didn't order one of these because they realize how cool it would be if the IDE displayed real terms like “Refactor”, “Step Into”, “Open method declaration”, “Deploy”, etc. for the very large number of context-dependent shortcuts a modern IDE has?

  > ␛ is just keyboard syntactic sugar for control left square bracket

Technically — and here I go of on the stereotypical irrelevant nerd tangent (bind the adjectives as you will) — it's the other way around. ASCII was certainly designed with Shift and Control modifiers in mind, and arranged so that a device could have those keys merely flip a bit (see e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-paired_keyboard>), but nothing actually mandates that those keys exist and that Control+h generate Backspace or Shift+h generate H.

I absolutely agree that Control+x ↦ x&0x3F is an established convention, and it continually annoys me that Windows and Windows-aping software violates it.

Ha, this is like "walked 5 miles in the snow uphill to school" territory.

I personally don't like the idea of losing some keys, keys are nice, my fingers can feel where they are at all times. But that said my fingers also know exactly where to go without the feedback of the keys. I do like the prospect of programming a custom touch bar for various programs, that seems kind of neat, but I would have also been fine with keeping my function keys (I mean custom bindings are what function keys are for in the first place, no?).

Awwwwww man!! You just brought back such green-CRT-tinted memories there...

How about non-US keyboard layouts? [ alone is altgr-8 on german layout.

I wondered about that in the other thread. But it actually works with Ctrl+Ä or Ctrl-Ü (depending whether you are in OSX or Windows) in the console.

However this still does not help for a missing ESC in other applications (like IDEs where you sometimes want to close an annoying intellisense dialog).

> Bah, these entitled kids.

Yeah these entitled kids paying > $3000 for a product, they should just shut up and give money to Apple /s

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