So I was recently enlightened to the fact that you don’t need to take your left hand off the keyboard to exit insert mode in vim. Who knew!?
In insert mode, press ctrl+[ . In fact, my guess is that it’s not a feature of a vim but an alternative to pressing the esc key which requires you to move your hand off the keyboard. I feel like I knew this, but never really realized its application to exiting insert mode in vim.
Anyways, I’ve been pressing esc for several years now. So much so, that if I use other editors (because vim is not around 
), I will press esc in those editors too. This typically happens on someone else’s Window’s box when they’ve asked for my help with something or other. You can imagine that switching from esc to ^[ is going to be quite hard, but I’m determined to do it as I think it’ll be faster.
PS: this is a good read about efficiency of editing in general
