[GLLUG] vim ESC

Charles Ulrich charles at bityard.net
Mon Nov 23 16:22:09 EST 2009


On Mon, November 23, 2009 2:03 pm, Clay Dowling wrote:
> Vi isn't built to make you comfortable.  Vi is built to get the job
> done and done well under really lousy conditions.  Part of the
> original design spec from Bill Joy: must work on his crappy 300 baud
> connection.
>
> If you need more sensible editors pico, nano and emacs are top choices.

I think Brent's main point was that vi seems to be very well engineered
for editing speed as much as editing power. And it does a fantastic job of
that except for the lonely and distant Esc key on today's keyboards.

I would guess that back in the day, the Esc key wasn't always positioned
so far away from everyone else on the keyboard. On those terminals,
exiting insert mode probably didn't require your hand to leave the home
row. Now, it always does because the IBM PC keyboard layout has come to be
the de facto on pretty much every keyboard.

I've toyed with the idea of somehow remapping ` to Esc since I never use a
backtick for anything. Haven't quite had the motivation to follow through,
though.

Charles
-- 
http://bityard.net



More information about the linux-user mailing list