A few weeks ago Apple announced their new MacBook Pro. To make way for their latest gimmick (the TouchBar) they removed the row of the keyboard that contained the Esc and function keys.
I’ll do what I can to avoid spending money on this sort of thing lest I further encourage more backwards progress on Apple’s part, but just in case they’ve started a trend, I’ve decided to hedge my bets.
The use of Esc in Vim has always been considered a bit of an anti-pattern due to the travel distance required off of the home row. Despite that, I continued to use it anyway because the recommended alternative of Ctrl+[ is awkward, especially on a Mac with its diminished Ctrl key. There’s also something to be said for the satisfying feeling of reaching up and banging the Esc key.
I decided to make the transition, but to use Ctrl+C instead of Ctrl+[, which is also a shortcut that’s enabled by default. The first problem I ran into was that despite knowing what key I wanted to hit, muscle memory would always take me back to Esc. A quick Google search revealed a good solution to that problem:
inoremap <esc> NO ESCAPE FOR YOU
Now instead of taking you out of Insert mode, Esc will now inject an unhelpful string of junk which must then be painstakingly erased. I’ve already had to do it about twenty times writing this article. Now it’s all up to me: sink or swim.
One annoying thing about Ctrl+C is that when you accidentally use it from Normal mode, it shows you this beginner-friendly message:
Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim
Having learnt this the hard way the first time I opened Vim about ten years ago, I don’t really need to see it anymore. Here’s a binding that will stop it from coming up:
nnoremap <C-c> <silent> <C-c>
Did I make a mistake? Please consider sending a pull request.