Things started when Apple started using touch bar on MacBook. Admittedly, touch bar is good, but as a vimer, I found it really inconvenient to switch between normal mode and insert mode. One day, I could not bear it, so I decided to make some changes.

Vim has a nick name “Text editor of the Gods”, so there are a lot of things you can do about vim. You can customize your vim to make it easier to use, also more powerful.

Mapping

So I decided to use map in Vimscript. Mapping is a very useful feature of Vimscript, and the magic of mapping is that mapping keys lets you tell Vim:

When I press these pattern, I want vim to do this perticular stuff rather than whatever vim would normally do.

You can treat is as a shortcut. And you can map keys in normal mode, insert mode and other modes.

So, for example, look at this Vimscript below:

:map - dd

When you put this line in your .vimrc file and run source .vimrc to make the .vimrc work. You are telling vim that the next time, in normal mode, when I press “-”, the vim will do exactly what you do with pressing two characters dd. So the vim will delete that line. And I find map command also works in visual mode.

And, there are also some similar command. We can use nmap, vmap, imap to tell vim to only use the mapping in normal,visual, or insert mode respectively.

Side Effects of map

There are two side effects of using map command.

• The danger of recursing
• May have conflict to vim-plugin mapping keys

For example,

nmap dd o<esc>jdd

you may think this command would open a new line, and esc to normal mode and move down one line and delete this line. However, because o<esc>jdd include “dd”, so it will do it recursively and can never end.

Nonrecursive Mapping

Vim offers another commands that would ignore recursive mapping. Just add nore in the front of map. So now we would like to use noremap rather than map.

There are nnoremap, inoremap, vnoremap and used in normal, insert and visual mode respectively. There are similar to map sets.

Leaders

Another trick is leaders in vim.

There are some keys that we don’t use very often in our daily vim usage. Such as -, +, ,. Those are really safe to be used in mappings.

So how about using them as a Prefix key.

let mapleader=','

Then we can use ‘leaders’ in vimscripts.

For example,

nnoremap <leader>x d$

and :source % in vim to make it works. The next time when you press ,x in normal mode, vim will delete to the end of current line from the cursor position.

Get rid of “<esc>”

Now come back to the problem I have, the touch bar. I feel really uncomfortable to use “<esc>” to switch between normal mode and insert mode. So I add the following lines to my .vimrc file.

let mapleader=','

" save file
inoremap <leader>w <Esc>:w<cr>
noremap <leader>w :w<cr>

" map <Esc> to jj
inoremap jj <Esc>

The line starts with " means comments.

I first use , as my leader. Then I map the save command to ,w so next time whenever in insert mode or normal mode and when I press ,w it would save the file and back to normal mode. Because I can use ZZ to save and quit, I do not need to map them. At last, I map “<esc>” to jj. Because there is no continues two j characters in english words and j is exactly where my index finger is placed on the keyboard. There we are^_^