The Ideal VIM Keyboard

My colleague Niklas nagged me for not having disabled the caps lock key on my MacBook Pro. I was a bit disoriented at first but coming to think of it, I haven’t used the caps lock key since I got the MBP back in April.

This made me think about which keys I actually use. Being a recent VIM convert I wonder if Apple’s designers hate VIM. Efficient editing in VIM require you to use the escape key a lot. On the MBP the escape key is one of the smallest keys on the keyboard for some reason.

Am I whining about superfluous things? Maybe so. Maybe I should just shut up and remap my caps lock key to escape.

Give me larger keys!

The ideal VIM keyboard should have a large escape key. The colon is used a lot too. Maybe it could look something like this:

The ideal VIM keyboard

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 21:27 and is filed under General, VIM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Comments

  1. Yan says at 2006-10-26 23:10:

    The ideal vim keyboard should not require you to lift your hand to hit Esc. You can have an ideal vvim keyboard by remapping your caps lock to an escape, or remap it to a control and use Ctrl+[ instead of escape

  2. JackyMool says at 2007-02-04 23:02:

    Who can help me with .httpaccess ?
    where i can fined full information about .httpaccess file syntaxis?

  3. steveo says at 2007-04-25 17:04:

    Ctrl-C, by default, will do the same thing as ESC in vim.

  4. ahsjar says at 2007-09-02 18:09:

    original vi was made on the ADM3A terminal:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM3A

  5. robert says at 2009-04-08 21:04:

    CTRL-[ is the preferred way to exit insert mode.

  6. Sam says at 2009-04-17 16:04:

    Esc is a small key on all keyboards.
    Swap esc and caps lock and you’re done.
    The colon isn’t actuall used that much, nearly all the : commands have a normal mode alternative that doesnt use it.

    The person who suggested a ctrl combination: [facepalm]…tut, tut, EMACS users…

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