Binding F1 to ESC in VIM

3
votes

Evening,

I got a Lenovo T400 laptop, and the F1 is in a stupid place, and keep hitting it instead of hitting Esc to get change modes with VIM.

I did some googling, and tried adding

map <F1> <Esc>
imap <F1> <Esc>

to my ~/.vimrc file, but to no avail...

If I can't do this with a vimrc, is there a way to change it at the linux/system level?

Using Linux Mint 14 MATE

--

Answer: The terminal application has it's on keyboard shortcuts defined. Under Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts you can disable the help. Then the map/imap above will work fine.

You can also edit the keyboard settings in the main system keyboard preferences. Open that up and go to Layouts -> Options and play with the Caps Lock key behaviour. You can disable it, or even bind it to ESC.

1
vimlinux-mint

1 Answers

4
votes

It may be that your keyboard isn't producing the keycode that Vim translates to <F1>. In Vim, go into insert mode, and type Ctrl-v. Then press F1. The string that you just inserted is the string that needs to go on the left-hand side of your map command. It might be <x-F1> or something similar. You can do this to insert the key name directly in your .vimrc file.

Remember to restart Vim after editing your .vimrc file.

Regardless of whether you get this working, you might like to swap your Esc and Caps Lock keys, which is quite a popular thing to do among Vim users. You can't do that within Vim, you need to edit your X configuration to achieve it. The Vim tips wiki tells you how.