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Vim Foot Pedal

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Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#111
post #22

I resolved this pain by making the Caps Lock key work as it should: tap for “Esc” and hold for “Control”. Then I took the Escape key and made it Caps Lock—it’s occasionally useful, but not nearly enough to warrant a home row position. You can do this with Karaniner Elements on macOS. There’s a way to do it on Windows too, but how escapes me at the moment.

I feel like people who think the "CTRL" key goes on the home row never pressed CTRL+Z, CTRL+X, CTRL+C or CTRL+V in their entire lives. Makes zero sense ergonomically to put the CTRL key on the home row. I tried it for about 0.05 seconds and after pressing CTRL+Z one time I knew it was not a good idea for me. pinky finger does not like pressing a key while being on a higher row than another finger also pressing a key.…

That is simple. Just keep your control key and map caps lock to control also. That way you are never out of control.

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#112
This takes me back... 25 years ago I visited a company called "Zeus" in Cambridge UK, who made a web server that competed with Apache httpd, and was told about their developers' Escape pedals.

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like people who think the "CTRL" key goes on the home row never pressed CTRL+Z, CTRL+X, CTRL+C or CTRL+V in their entire lives. Makes zero sense ergonomically to put the CTRL key on the home row. I tried it for about 0.05 seconds and after pressing CTRL+Z one time I knew it was not a good idea for me. pinky finger does not like pressing a key while being on a higher row than another finger also pressing a key.…

thats becauze ctrl z/x/c/v aren't used for copy paste if you're using vim or emacs.

Now if only other programs would agree (e.g. web browser)

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#115
post #72
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d recommend Power Toys for that. AHK is cool but better for scripts and automations. Power Toys has lots of other neat functions and support by MS.

I found power toys didn't work too well, especially when you want to turn it off and on, or put exceptions for some programs I just have a simple autohotkey script + vim like keys for going up and down in textboxes/selection/dropdowns. Only downside is the mess that happens when on other machines that don't have that, also try to use ^[ as much as possible.

AutoHotKey scripts can be compiled in to portable executables.

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#116
post #22

I resolved this pain by making the Caps Lock key work as it should: tap for “Esc” and hold for “Control”. Then I took the Escape key and made it Caps Lock—it’s occasionally useful, but not nearly enough to warrant a home row position. You can do this with Karaniner Elements on macOS. There’s a way to do it on Windows too, but how escapes me at the moment.

I already had my caps-lock as backspace so I settled on using single quote as ESC. It works great except when I need to use a lot of single quotes of course.

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#117
post #82
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On macOS you can do this using just the stock OS. It's under keyboard settings. You can also do this on iOS, it's awesome if you have a physical keyboard and like to use vim on your iPad

You can do the simple remapping. The “tap for escape, hold for control” takes additional software.

Here's a summary on how to do it on the respective OS's https://gist.github.com/tanyuan/55bca522bf50363ae4573d4bdcf0...

It's an interesting concept. I have been using capslock as control for so long that I don't know I could get used to this though.

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#118
I'm surprised that nobody brought up yet that pressing i is rarely the only way to enter insert mode. As a vim power user, I use a, o and c (after different types of selecting some part of existing text) at least as often. That would make the clutch useless in the presented form, so I'm skeptical that this is actually being used.

Using the clutch either as a full esc replacement would make more sense (send esc on tap down, send nothing on release). Or inverted, send nothing on tap down but send esc on release, and have the user train that they subconciously tap the foot down upon entering insert mode by any means.

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#119
post #22

I resolved this pain by making the Caps Lock key work as it should: tap for “Esc” and hold for “Control”. Then I took the Escape key and made it Caps Lock—it’s occasionally useful, but not nearly enough to warrant a home row position. You can do this with Karaniner Elements on macOS. There’s a way to do it on Windows too, but how escapes me at the moment.

I feel like people who think the "CTRL" key goes on the home row never pressed CTRL+Z, CTRL+X, CTRL+C or CTRL+V in their entire lives. Makes zero sense ergonomically to put the CTRL key on the home row. I tried it for about 0.05 seconds and after pressing CTRL+Z one time I knew it was not a good idea for me. pinky finger does not like pressing a key while being on a higher row than another finger also pressing a key.…

My fix for this is to also remap holding the Enter key to right control.

That way I can use the "control" key on the opposite side of the alpha key, the same way one is meant to do with the shift key when touch typing.

Re: Vim Foot Pedal

#120

I actually bought one a while back for the emacs metakeys issue which had 4 buttons (it was originally designed for turning pages on a pad while playing music). It worked pretty well while it lasted, but broke after like a year. Having a qmk split keyboard (the iris specifically https://keeb.io/collections/iris-split-ergonomic-keyboard ) was a more lasting solution that also solved some other ergonomic issues. Now my…

I think resourcing foot pedals from the music world (guitars and bass mostly) would be the way to go, they're designed for heavy use and would likely be much more durable.

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