Comment by sandbach
I'm curious, how do you avoid friction between inserting text and editing? Surely moving your hand to the mouse, arrow keys, or Ctrl key for an Emacs keybinding takes longer than pressing "i"?
I'll grant that Esc is further away, but it can be remapped.
I rebind ESC to caps lock, works wonders as it's right on the same keyboard row as the home keys.