[bengale]

> Presumably everyone thinks their own defaults are 'sensible', otherwise they wouldn't be using them.

Maybe, although I set my caps lock up to be escape when tapped and control when held, I don't think that would be sensible for many people at all unless the knew why they wanted it.

> I think the most sensible defaults are those that come out of the box, rather than spending time tweaking things.

This is probably true, I find it very difficult to use anyone else's system since my config is non-standard.

[matwood]

> I set my caps lock up to be escape

Which was the only sensible thing to do when Apple dropped the ESC key ;)

I'm so used to caps == ESC now, it takes me a minute to realize what's wrong when I'm on a new system/keyboard.

[myrandomcomment]

Cap locks should be control the way god intended it! :)

You can use the hidutil if you want to script changes yourself:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2450...

Or Karabiner Elements:

https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/blob/master/R...

I have an Filco Japanese keyboard and the default settings on macOS even when the keyboard is set to Japanese (QWERTY JIS) gets the 英数 (alphanumeric) key, and かな (kana) key wrong (and they are supported on the built in laptop keyboard).

[saagarjha]

Word of warning: hidutil keeps the caps lock delay, so you’ll miss short presses. This drove me mad until I figured it out but by then Karabiner had thankfully been updated for the new OS.

[woleium]

you can do both! (on a mac at least) I remap caps lock to escape using keyboard prefpane, then use karabiner to make it ctrl if used with another key.

press it by itself, escape.

press it and a, ctrl-a

perfect!

[chrisseaton]

> I'm so used to caps == ESC now, it takes me a minute to realize what's wrong when I'm on a new system/keyboard.

Isn't this a bad thing?

[Nullabillity]

Compare how much time you spend using your own system vs others'.

[chrisseaton]

If you learn the default, it doesn't matter how much time you spend on any given system. I don't get why people make themselves less portable by becoming dependent on non-defaults.

[chipotle_coyote]

For what it's worth, I use Vim fairly regularly and have always left the escape key alone. (The "butterfly keyboard" Mac tempts to me remap it, but that is not, in the final analysis, Vim's fault.) I do, however, tend to remap caps lock to control, because I think it's a better place for it and it's not exactly a high effort thing to do the remapping -- it's built right into the Mac's system preferences.

As other people have pointed out, most of us aren't regularly using computers that aren't ours (or at least "ours," in the case of work machines permanently assigned to us), and I suspect nearly everyone who reads this web site has changed more than one thing on their computer that deviates from a fresh out-of-the-box default. :)

[matwood]

The default is reaching to the top left corner of the keyboard. I know the default and it's terrible if someone uses vim. In macOS it's trivial to remap the caps lock key to ESC system wide through the built in preferences. So while it's not that way out the box, it's certainly in the realm of default configurations any user might make on their machine.

[chrisseaton]

I can't really understand picking an editor that is so awkward that it relies on me reconfiguring my hardware and breaking the labelling of the keys to make it usable.

[dbalatero]

Who is this mythical person jumping between tons of computers? Who is dependent? The few times you're on a different computer you just deal and fallback to the mean.

[bengale]

I do it because it makes my life easier on the system I use 99% of the time.

[matwood]

It's 1 key change, and since I use vim keybindings in almost everything it's much easier on the system I use 99.9% of the time.