When using Vim (specifically, MacVim), I hit ESC about a thousand times a day. It's a bit far to reach for such an important key.
Has anybody mapped this to something more comfortable? If so, how did you do it?
Caps Lock is a nice alternative but these are predefined:
CTRL-[
which is completely equivalent to ESC
andCTRL-C
which is in most cases* the same as ESC
also, a very common mapping is the jj
(or even <leader>j
) since the sequence 'jj' is extremely rare in typing.
There is a similar discussion on SO
*it will not expand abbreviations
You could remap the Caps Lock key to an ESC key which is shown via the following superuser question. Map CapsLock key to ESC in Mac OS X
Control + [
does the same thing, but that's not really easier for me.