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Comment by atweiden | Hacker News Reader

Die hard vimeleon here.

IMHO chording the 'j' and 'k' keys simultaneously [1] is a severely underutilized solution for escape.

Try it. You'll love it.

If you're going to rebind capslock to something — and this is particularly true if you're on macOS — rebind it to backspace. Capslock escape isn't useful outside of Vim. Backspace is useful everywhere, including inside Vim.

[1] https://github.com/kana/vim-arpeggio

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> If you're going to rebind capslock to something — and this is particularly true if you're on macOS — rebind it to backspace.

No, rebind it to Compose. Makes life a lot easier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

That's interesting. I'm a bit spoiled by primarily using Vim to write code and prosé in American English. Vim's digraph feature (Ctrl-K by default) has handled unicode char input nicely enough for me, but I wonder if the compose key could be of use when writing text in Japanese for example.

I actually meant to do it systemwide, for when you're writing or googling things not in English, or when you want to write a fancy ⅝. The day I have to start putting diacritics into computer code is the day I quit programming:)

I think it's no good for Japanese, but I know very little about Japanese input. Romanji is still Japanese, right?

Now that's an idea. Haskellers routinely use x' as a variable name, but ẋ and x̃ are also valid ones!

I use option-e e to insert é, option-n n to insert ñ, etc. I noticed this while pressing option in the Keyboard Viewer.

The problem with your jk solution is that it doesn’t work in other Vi-like interfaces such as those provided by readline or shells.

Also ctrl-h is backspace so mapping caps to ctrl gives you a convenient escape and backspace shortcut.

(It also gives you a heap more terminal shortcuts but that’s another story).

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