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As a Vim user one of my gripes when first using Vim was how cumbersome the built in help files were. I guess that's why there are so many "vim cheatsheets" out there, the built in documentation is a pain to use.



Respectfully disagree. I think vim's help documentation is quite good. The inbuilt reference is extensive and with examples as well.

Perhaps it's navigating the :help window you find cumbersome?


The biggest pain in vim is the escape key. And no, ctrl+[ isn't any better.


I have capslock mapped to escape and never notice which one I use (started doing that after my escape key broke on a laptop about 15 years ago)

I believe people with poor keyboards don't even have escape keys any more though


What do you mean by "poor keyboards"?


My collegues are constantly complaining their (mac) laptop keyboards are terrible, however aren't ballsy enough to say "F-U" to the corporate choice of a mac or a windows laptop.


Well, HNers complains the MacBook keyboard as it’s a complete trash, but please remember that there are plenty of people that likes and even loves the butterfly keyboard. The keyboard itself is pretty awesome and provides much stabler keys than usual keyboards (whether it’s membrane or mechanical). They work regardless of what part of key I press, which means that typo rates significantly decreases. I’m happily using my MBP’s butterfly keyboard with Vim. Just please, don’t say keyboards are terrible after using for a few hours. There’s a reason why Apple is keep placing the butterfly keyboards in top-range Macbooks.


I'm not saying it, the people using them all the time are saying it.

I'm happy with the generic HP keyboard I'm using at the moment, circa 2014, and my T410s old style thinkpad keyboard.


I imagine poor is a measurement of quality rather than personal wealth here. MacBook keyboards with the touchbar come to mind.


Why is ctrl-[ not better? You split the workload between two hands.

You -do- have the useless, enormous capslock key remapped to control, right? ;-)

Anyway, it's common to remap jj or jk to esc.


I added this very handy little mapping a while back:

noremap! kj <esc>

it means when you press kj [0] that it's the same as pressing escape.. very handy (the times when I deliberately want to press k and then j are still zero)

[0] https://github.com/patrickdavey/dotfiles/blob/335254dce90d5c...


Mapping Capslock simultaneously to both ESC and Control solved this problem for me. It might not be your piece of cake but it definitely improved my vim experience greatly. See for example (I'm not the author) https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/remap-caps-lock-to-escape-and-...




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