How to Vim: Proper Ways to Escape

ESC (Escape) is one of the most central key in the world of Vim. It takes you from Insert mode to Normal mode and it also serves to interrupt operations in progress in Vim. You’ll be using it a lot!

Vim has a very long history. It’s a product of a different era where the keyboard layouts were quite different as well. Below is a picture of the legendary ADM-3A, which Bill Joy famously used when he created vi:

The problem with ESC, however, is that on many modern keyboards it’s not the easiest key to reach. Fortunately, you have plenty of options to improve the situation on that front. Let’s go over them in order of increasing complexity (and price).

Use Control + [ instead

Pressing Control + [ is exactly the same as pressing ESC as far as most terminals are concerned, and for many people (me included) that’s a lot easier to press than reaching for ESC at the top-left corner of my keyboard. This becomes even more convenient if you remap your mostly useless Caps Lock key to Control.

There’s also Control + c that you can consider using. When invoked in insert mode it behaves almost like ESC, with a couple of caveats that you need to be aware of:

Quit insert mode, go back to Normal mode. Do not check for abbreviations. Does not trigger the InsertLeave autocommand event.

Add an extra keybinding to insert mode

In many languages certain sequences of characters are quite uncommon (e.g. xx), so those are something you can bind in insert mode to serve as exit. jj is a classic, with other popular options being ii and jk.

inoremap jj <ESC>

" or alternatively
inoremap jk <ESC>
inoremap kj <ESC>

Those certainly work well in English, but with other languages your mileage will vary. On top of this - in other contexts you’ll still need to press ESC, Control+[ or Control+c. I kind of like an uniform approach to the Escape problem.

Use a dual-function Control key

Continuing the line of reasoning from above, we can go a bit further and actually use a keyboard remapping tool to have our (left) Control key behave as Control when held down and as ESC when tapped (pressed quickly). That’s actually what I’m doing and I think that’s the best possible setup.

These days I’m mostly using macOS and the popular Karabiner Elements keyboard remapper. For it you’ll need to add something like the snippet below to your karabiner.json configuration file:

{
  "description": "Control as Escape when tapped, Control when held",
  "manipulators": [
    {
      "type": "basic",
      "from": {
        "key_code": "left_control",
        "modifiers": {
          "optional": ["any"]
        }
      },
      "to": [
        {
          "key_code": "left_control"
        }
      ],
      "to_if_alone": [
        {
          "key_code": "escape"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

For optimal results - make Caps Lock your left Control.

Use the right keyboard

Some keyboards are more vim-friendly than others. By this I mean they place ESC where ~ normally is, which makes pressing ESC a lot easier. A couple of classic examples are:

• HHKB (my current keyboard)¹
• Leopold FC660 (my former keyboard)

On top of this, the HHKB replaces Caps Lock with Control directly, so there’s one less remapping you have to do yourself. The keyboards I’ve mentioned are on the expensive side, but they are legendary in the programming community for a reason.

I’m not a fan of this approach, though, as I’m extremely used to the placement of the ~ and it’s commonly used in many programming languages.² My Leopold offered a middle way by having the ~ on a different layer, but I still preferred to have it be a ~ by default.

Of course, your mileage here will vary, based on your personal habits and preferences. Some people swear by their keyboards with “programmer layout” and that’s fine.

Epilogue

And that’s a wrap! You certainly have some options to consider, but for me a dual-function Control/ESC, placed where Caps Lock normally is, is the way to go.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

1. My recent purchase of the HHKB was part of my inspiration to play again with Vim. I think it’s clear that the keyboard was designed with Vim users in mind. ↩

2. My main issue with non-standard layouts is that I still have to use laptop keyboards and they keyboards of some colleagues/friends from time to time. ↩