I believe to remember that a few decades ago on some Unix variant I was able to use some kind of vi with some settings where I was able to configure it for not having to do Esc at all for the movements through the text when using all the arrow keys of the terminal I've used and also not having to press any key to start typing the text after these movements and only had to do Esc to type in the non-trivial (i.e. non-movement) commands.<p>Effectively: as soon as the file is opened, I'd remain in the text entering mode (however it is called in vim terminology) pressing any arrow key (or maybe even the pg up, pg down etc) would exit that mode (implicit Esc) perform the expected movement and at the end automatically return to the starting mode.<p>I believe I was able to achieve it then by assigning the whole sequences (e.g. Esc, movement, i) to be played as I pressed only one of these keys, and automatic i after the file open, and I don't know if all this is possible now with vim, the little I've tried to find I haven't found that functionality. I'd even claim that having something like this would make vim much less frustrating for the casual users. What I'm sure is that I don't have any written record what I've did then -- it was "works for me" then and for that environment.<p>Maybe somebody knows more about this? I'd like to be able to achieve such a behavior in Vim even if it's the opposite of what people in these tutorials try to teach people to do, as an example, I haven't understood what this does (it is not clearly explained here except claiming "the <Esc> key for leaving insert mode is, in my opinion, rather antiquated. Vim is about efficiency, and it's hardly efficient to leave the home keys if you don't have to. So don't.") but it seems to me, nothing I'd like:<p>> inoremap jk <ESC><p>I'd argue that not having to even change the modes explicitly at all is more efficient than optimizing the key with which you permanently change the modes. Somebody would say "but then you can't do these nice number-movement to move number of times" -- I don't care, it takes more time to count or to try, err and undo when the number is wrong, than to just use the plain keys. It was not so when editing from the terminal over 300 baud lines, which was the original use case for these commands, but nobody edits over them today.