The Escape key (ESC) is legendary in vim, Emacs’s arch-rival. It’s so commonly used (mostly to switch back to normal mode and interrupt commands in progress) that you’ll find many articles on where to remap it (e.g. to Caps Lock), and there are also many keyboards that place ESC where ~ normally is, to make it more accessible.1

In Emacs-land, however, we never really speak about ESC… Why so? Well, we use C-g to interrupt commands, and we obviously don’t have modal editing, at least not by default. Still, I think ESC has its uses in Emacs, even if they are not super obvious at first. For instance there’s the keyboard-escape-quit command, that’s described like this:

Exit the current “mode” (in a generalized sense of the word). This command can exit an interactive command such as ‘query-replace’, can clear out a prefix argument or a region, can get out of the minibuffer or other recursive edit, cancel the use of the current buffer (for special-purpose buffers), or go back to just one window (by deleting all but the selected window).

Basically, it’s a fancier way of doing C-g (keyboard-quit), and it’s mapped to ESC ESC ESC (triple escape). Not the most convenient keybinding, but still OK if your Escape is well positioned and you’d like to avoid holding down a modifier key.2 If you take a look at the keybinding in Emacs’s docs, though, you’ll see it’s listed as M-ESC ESC, rather than ESC ESC ESC. And this is what makes ESC really interesting - it serves as a substitute for Meta, but you don’t have to hold down ESC - instead M-something keybindings can be triggered by pressing ESC and the other key sequentially. Go ahead and try the following:

  • ESC x (same as M-x)
  • ESC g g (goto-line, same as M-g g)
  • ESC e (forward-sentence, same as M-e)

I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty handy, especially if you’re using macOS, where on many keyboards the Option (Meta) keys are pretty short, or one of them is even missing (the right one).

For me using Emacs on macOS has always been a bit of a struggle, as the Meta is way more useful than Command (Super), and historically I swapped them3 because of this, but then I struggled when I had to use someone else’s keyboard. (or even my own, as I normally contained this rebinding only to Emacs). So, the ability to use ESC instead of Meta is definitely a welcome one, and I find myself doing this quite often.

Before we wrap up consider keybindings like M->, M-! or M-% that require you to hold down both Shift and Meta when typing them. I think they way more pleasant as:

  • Esc >
  • Esc !
  • Esc %

Admittedly, it took me a while to get used to this, as I didn’t pay much to the ESC key until I was fairly far into my Emacs journey. Topics like RSI prevention and keybinding ergonomics rarely bother young people.

So, did you know about the role of ESC in Emacs? Are you making use of it? If you have any other tips to share on the subject I’d be happy to read them.

That’s all I have for you today! ESC x forever!

  1. HHKB is probably the most famous example, but there are many many others that do the same. ↩

  2. I’m using a dual-function keybinding for what’s normally Caps Lock on most keyboards - it’s Control wwhen held down and Escape otherwise. For me that’s a good idea regardless of the editor someone’s using. ↩

  3. See https://batsov.com/articles/2012/10/14/emacs-on-osx/. ↩