<story><title>Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim</title><url>https://github.com/iggredible/Learn-Vim</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshMcguigan</author><text>When I was first learning Vim I remapped caps lock to escape, and it was a huge improvement. But as I became more comfortable in Vim I realized I was using the control key a lot.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve since remapped caps lock to control, and use ctrl-[ as escape (this is default behavior). I find having an easily accesible control key is very useful, even outside Vim. You can see in your link that it is actually the control key that used to be in the position we now put the caps lock key.&lt;p&gt;It does seem like remapping caps lock to escape when pressed alone and control when pressed with another key would be nice, but that wasn&amp;#x27;t an option for me (on wayland) as far as I know.&lt;p&gt;I bring this up only because there was a week or two transition period when I made this change, and I probably would have been better off if I had mapped caps lock to control from the start.</text></item><item><author>rubyn00bie</author><text>Two things that helped me more than anything with &amp;quot;learning&amp;quot; vim and or ever wanting to use it:&lt;p&gt;1. Remap your &amp;quot;capslock&amp;quot; key to &amp;quot;escape.&amp;quot; Vi was written using an  ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;catonmat.net&amp;#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;catonmat.net&amp;#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys&lt;/a&gt; has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap &amp;quot;capslock&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;escape&amp;quot; when pressed alone, and &amp;quot;ctrl&amp;quot; when pressed with another key.&lt;p&gt;2. Make your leader key something easy like the comma character &amp;quot;,&amp;quot; E.g. to make a horizontal split, I press (not including quotation marks) &amp;quot;,h&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;,v&amp;quot; to make a vertical one.&lt;p&gt;Once I did those two things it all made so much more sense... It&amp;#x27;s also great because most editors these days support vim bindings, so even if you don&amp;#x27;t want to use vim you can still benefit from its really-awsome-once-you-figure-it-out UX.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmohseni</author><text>On Linux and Mac it’s possible to have caps be escape when pressed alone or control when pressed with another key.  On Linux the software is called xcape. :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim</title><url>https://github.com/iggredible/Learn-Vim</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshMcguigan</author><text>When I was first learning Vim I remapped caps lock to escape, and it was a huge improvement. But as I became more comfortable in Vim I realized I was using the control key a lot.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve since remapped caps lock to control, and use ctrl-[ as escape (this is default behavior). I find having an easily accesible control key is very useful, even outside Vim. You can see in your link that it is actually the control key that used to be in the position we now put the caps lock key.&lt;p&gt;It does seem like remapping caps lock to escape when pressed alone and control when pressed with another key would be nice, but that wasn&amp;#x27;t an option for me (on wayland) as far as I know.&lt;p&gt;I bring this up only because there was a week or two transition period when I made this change, and I probably would have been better off if I had mapped caps lock to control from the start.</text></item><item><author>rubyn00bie</author><text>Two things that helped me more than anything with &amp;quot;learning&amp;quot; vim and or ever wanting to use it:&lt;p&gt;1. Remap your &amp;quot;capslock&amp;quot; key to &amp;quot;escape.&amp;quot; Vi was written using an  ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;catonmat.net&amp;#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;catonmat.net&amp;#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys&lt;/a&gt; has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap &amp;quot;capslock&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;escape&amp;quot; when pressed alone, and &amp;quot;ctrl&amp;quot; when pressed with another key.&lt;p&gt;2. Make your leader key something easy like the comma character &amp;quot;,&amp;quot; E.g. to make a horizontal split, I press (not including quotation marks) &amp;quot;,h&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;,v&amp;quot; to make a vertical one.&lt;p&gt;Once I did those two things it all made so much more sense... It&amp;#x27;s also great because most editors these days support vim bindings, so even if you don&amp;#x27;t want to use vim you can still benefit from its really-awsome-once-you-figure-it-out UX.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cbcoutinho</author><text>I recently learned this trick since getting a new MacBook pro with the touch bar esc key. I couldn&amp;#x27;t stand the lack of travel and didn&amp;#x27;t want to remap keys, now I use the ctrl-[ combo on all keyboards out of habit</text></comment>