OR you could just type
inoremap jk <esc>
inoremap <esc> <nop>
in your .vimrc and then you don’t have to hit esc to go back to normal mode ever again. And you don’t need a stupid foot pedal either.
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This sounds like a great idea for all the professional writers still hooked on Wordstar.
I’m surprised that’s not the name of a text editor.
I occasionally weep hot bitter tears when I think of the trackball on the old mac powerbooks from the 90s. I loved those! I could whack the trackball once and the inertia would carry it to precisely the pixel I intended, all the way across the screen. Physics ftw
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Luxury. We had to chew th’ ‘oles in th’ punchcards wit’ our teeth. In th’ dark.
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I was thinking the same thing. Full disclosure, I’m mostly an infrastructure jockey (sysadmin+networking), not a software developer, so maybe my priorities are slightly different.
I’m always amazed by the “battle station” mentality some of my peers use in setting up their workstations: Lots of monitors, goofy trackballs, bonkers ergo keyboards, etc…
Amazed, that is, until I watch one of them try to use their own damned laptop in a conference room or airplane: They’re totally lost and ineffective. Some can’t use the built-in pointing device on their own hardware.
I noticed a couple of decades ago that the point where I needed to be at my best was at 2AM, in the data center, banging away on a real VT100 at the prompt of a server that won’t boot or is in single user mode. None of my command aliases, special hardware, autofill goofiness, or even probably man pages would be available. Can I get the company back online under those circumstances?
I’ve honed my muscle memory over the years with that in mind, and I don’t look like an idiot on the occasions I have to sit at a customer’s desk to fix something. The main exception: I’ve set up a workstation similar to that used by the CCIE lab exam, so that I’d be fast and effective in that specific environment too.
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In over 30 years, I’ve only ever heard it pronounced vee-eye.
And then vim came around. It’s also pronounced vee-eye; the M is silent. Because vim is a pretty dumb name to give to a clone of vi.
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Vim’s an improvement over the original vi. Remember how vi would pop out of insert mode if you backspaced past the first character in the line? I used to curse Bill Joy every time that happened.
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Read that as “repetitive stress injury.” Still think it makes more sense that way.
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