It's a fun idea, but I'd imagine it's far too slow to press down your foot compared to tapping your fingers. I personally use a home-row combo as escape, by pressing down the left index and ring finger at the same time.
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Vim Foot Pedal
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#22I 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.
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#23I 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.
Karabiner elements*
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#24Sexy idea, but as someone who started using vi in 1987, a software solution seems way better. I map the seldom-otherwise-used key sequence jk to . If I were doing it over, kj would be slightly better, for times when I am Just Kidding. I do this in both .vimrc and .inputrc (using different syntax, sigh). My fingers generate the escape without thought. (As is true for tons of vim normal mode actions I use regularly.)
Both jk and kj appear in normal writing for me :( I briefly considered a foot pedal but it seems to me that foot dexterity is far lower than finger, meaning typing ihello is FAR faster than hello , not to mention that pedal travel is way longer. Of course you map esc to caps.
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Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#25When reading all these recommendations, I wonder why nobody is using ctrl-c to exit insert mode..?
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#26When reading all these recommendations, I wonder why nobody is using ctrl-c to exit insert mode..?
Dang that's a great idea. C-c C-c for me triggers vim slime, but the semantic of using it to exit insert mode might warrant a change
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#27I 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.
Switching ESC to Caps Lock took significantly less time to retrain muscle memory than I expected.
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#28I swear sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in the world that thinks hitting the ESC key is easy and no big deal. Maybe it’s decades of doing it, and I don’t consider myself especially dexterous, but I never have any problem with it.
It wasn’t that easy on the ill fated Touch Bar, which prompted my move to Caps.
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#29I 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 think AutoHotkey would be the program to use on Windows?
Re: Vim Foot Pedal
#30When reading all these recommendations, I wonder why nobody is using ctrl-c to exit insert mode..?
It behaves differently than Esc.