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Comment by warrenm | Hacker News Reader

I had a CS prof years ago tell us all the only thing we needed to know about vi(m) was the dammit key

As in "escape-q-dammit"

Just throwing another one out there:

    `Ctrl + [`  instead of `Esc` to save some finger travel.

Too fundamental of a key to even be a combination IMHO. I terminate each edit operation by it, like a dot at the end of a sentence, it needs to be a half a second operation so I can spend most of my time in normal mode.

I just remap Caps Lock to Esc system wise (a setting in both Linuxes and MacOs) and use both shift for Caps Lock (setting on Linux, Idk about MacOS)

I have always found the "jk" solution quite elegant although I don't use it

The benefit of using it system wise is that it then works with all programs that have a vi mode (zsh, gdbtui, etc.)

You can escape with alt too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34168031

ctrl+c is the same and even easier to type. I never use escape.

That’s not the exact same as Escape.

OK but as I personally see no need for escape in my use of vim, I judge it to be equivalent for my purpose (returning to normal mode).

So how is it different?

^C interrupts the current operation, while ^[ actually finishes the input sequence. The only practical difference I can think of is that when you entered input mode with a prefixed number, ^C ignores it. So 2iabc^C only writes `abc', but 2iabc^[ writes `abcabc'.

Edit: apparently ^C also ignores abbreviations. :ab lhs rhs, then ilhs^[ writes rhs, but ilhs^C writes lhs.

Also, ^C doesn't trigger InsertLeave autocommands.

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