For anyone who's never considered doing so, I highly recommend remapping the Caps-Lock key to Esc.

Fast access for the left pinky and makes for some nice mental symmetry in having the right pinky bound to Enter (Yes) and the left bound to Esc (No).

The only downside is when you're on someone else's machine and suddenly start typing in caps :)

I’d be fine with missing ctrl and esc, I actually don’t use them[1].

But I couldn’t work without any modifier keys next to space (cmd, opt), that’s an unexpected dealbreaker for me.

[1]: I remap ctrl to capslock and use ctrl+[ in place of escape.

Depending on cost, I absolutely want them to take my money, but I have absolutely no intention of using it; it's just for good looks and gags.

If anyone wants to have this style but in an actually usable keyboard, you can buy (at great expense) these keycaps and put them on whatever cherry-mx-compatible keyboard you like:

https://spkeyboards.com/products/sa-macrodata-refinement

Does anyone know if the thing that looks like a key in the middle of the four directional arrows is actually a key? If so, does it have a default key binding (it doesn't appear to have any symbol on it)? It it is an actual key, I assume that it can be mapped to something (presumably to replace one of the three super-common keys that they left out because this is intended as a meme keyboard, not a serious daily driver, but we all know that isn't going to stop some people from using it that way.)

Here is a link to the page where you actually buy the keyboard: https://www.atomickb.com/sign-up

They have their own blog post on it which I find better than the OP Apple insider post: https://www.atomickb.com/all-posts/severance-keyboard

> 70% layout

Isn't 70 or 75% supposed to have the arrows next to the other keys in a compact way? Here we have a regular keyboard with less keys.

Just don't open vim with it - there really will be no escape then.

Easy, use Ctrl-[ instead! It’s no different than pressing Esc, at least in terminal.

> So even today, on Unix-like systems, applications running in a terminal emulator receive the character Ctrl-I when the user presses the Tab key, the character Ctrl-[ when the user presses Esc, etc.

https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/3570

Well, if control is missing, too…

Of course, there are still more creative ways. Like

  :.! kill -9 $(pgrep -u $(whoami) vim)

Not so fast, if you can do `:` (i.e. enter command-line mode) then you can do plain `:q!` - no Esc or Ctrl needed.

How I understood the original problem is that you're in vim, you started editing text (insert mode) and now want to exit; but there is no Esc, so even exiting insert mode is a challenge. And now you added the constraint of missing Ctrl too, so no Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C.

If you type `:.! kill -9 $(pgrep -u $(whoami) vim)` then you just entered that as text into your document.

One answer could be to use the trackball, launch a new terminal window and kill the process from there.

Right, I didn't think that through…

But, to note: There's another alternative that should mostly still work here, even in the absence of Ctrl: Alt-Backspace

Are there any good tutorials on how to design mechanical keyboard PCBs?