Alternative to escape in vi and vi-alikes: control-[
I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards.
I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it sometimes can (sigh) on modern laptops.
Also the Alt key + letter keys produces a series of key codes prefixed by escape, so one can use any single letter normal-mode command with the Alt key, resulting in "Escape"+<key>. This is convenient to quickly switch to e.g. moving the cursor with e.g. `Alt+j` to both escape from insert mode back to normal mode _and_ move down a line.
I knew about the Ctrl+[ but this might be a game changer... I have tried vim several times but have never gotten used to the idea of staying in one mode or another (emacs chords is more intuitive to me). This seems promising.
Yes I did, and it probably wasn't really an option, but the moderators were kind enough to reclaim a very old, unused username (which I think was mine but forgot all the credentials to).
It's Stavros everywhere, it was only StavrosK here because the former was unavailable. I wasn't too fussed either way, but I asked the mods whether I could reclaim the username and they renamed the account to it, so here we are!
My point was that if there's a CTRL key on each side of the keyboard, then anything involving a ctrl+something is one-handed-able.
Whether it's good typing practice to use one hand for both the ctrl and the C, say, in a ctrl-c construct - I can't say.
I know that I rarely if ever use the right-hand control or alt keys (on a standard US-mode PC keyboard that has alt and control keys on both sides). I suspect this is poor form.
I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards.
I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it sometimes can (sigh) on modern laptops.