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When I hit esc or Ctrl-[ in insert mode vim, it hangs for half a second before exiting insert mode. It's not a performance-rooted hang, as I can type any character and vim will exit insert mode immediately, but if I hit esc and nothing else then vim will wait for half a second.

I believe that this is because there is some other key binding for esc, and vim is waiting to see if I hit it. This suspicion is re-enforced by the fact that when I set notimeout, vim will wait indefinitely for me to press another key before existing insert mode. This is quite annoying, as sometimes I like to have notimeout set.

Does anyone know how to make esc act immediately? Is there some other key binding that starts with esc that I can turn off?

For what it's worth, :map <Esc> and :imap <Esc> yield No mapping found, and I can reproduce this on a fresh install of vim with no .vimrc or .vim present.

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It may be because the escape character is part of a command sequence introducer – RedGrittyBrick Apr 23 '12 at 21:51
That is likely. Is there a way to tell vim to ignore such command sequences? – So8res Apr 23 '12 at 21:54
No, because then a lot of other keys won't work. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Apr 23 '12 at 21:55
The presence of <Esc> in such command sequences is not causing this problem. Vim handles the timing of <Esc> in those sequences differently than it handles <Esc> at the start of mappings. See ":help 'timeout'". Try executing ":imap <Esc>" to see if you have any insert-mode mappings beginnig with <Esc>. – garyjohn Apr 23 '12 at 22:20
No mappings found. I'm pretty sure it's related to timeout because when I set notimeout the problem is far worse, but there appear to be no mappings. (I can reproduce it with a fresh install / no .vimrc / no .vim too, FWIW.) – So8res Apr 23 '12 at 22:30
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Several keys, including the arrow keys, send escape sequences. So in order for these keys to work, vim has to check for additional characters following ESC to determine whether one of these keys was pressed. By default the escape sequence timeout and mapped sequence timeout are both controlled by the timeoutlen setting, which defaults to 1000 ms. However vim allows the escape sequence timeout to be set independently using ttimeoutlen. (Also set ttimeout if you want it to take effect even when timeout is off.) Unless you like to type escape sequences manually or you are using a 110 baud modem then you should have no issues reducing the escape sequence timeout. For example use :set ttimeoutlen=100 to set the escape sequence timeout to 100 ms. You can also disable recognition of escape sequences when in insert mode using :set noesckeys.

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For my vim configuration (I compiled my Vim from source) the ttimeoutlen was set to -1 which means it will use the 1000ms timeoutlen for everything. I set it to (a pretty aggressive) 5ms and now it is finally free from "sticky escape". – Steven Lu 5 hours ago

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