[hatmatrix]

I knew about the Ctrl+[ but this might be a game changer... I have tried vim several times but have never gotten used to the idea of staying in one mode or another (emacs chords is more intuitive to me). This seems promising.

[octos4murai]

Another popular thing people like to do is map something like <k-j> or <j-j> to Escape. This can be easily done in your vimrc.

While the <Alt-[a-z]> mapping is great and enabled by default, it does have the side effect of logging an extra key press based on the [a-z].