How to exit visual mode without a delay in Vim?

Question

In Vim, when in Visual mode, I have to press Esc twice to exit it and turn off the selection. After one press of Esc I have to wait 2 seconds for the selection to turn off.

What can I do to exit Visual mode immediately when Esc is pressed?

Answer 1

Executing following command helped me:

set timeoutlen=1000 ttimeoutlen=0 

see: http://www.johnhawthorn.com/2012/09/vi-escape-delays/.

Answer 2

As Ingo explained. Just thought I would post the solution: https://github.com/Greduan/dotfiles/blob/47f92e4db29d4ead778d877a85082b271de130ed/vim/vimrc.vim#L332-L346

Works pretty well. It's a little bit confusing for me as well, so I can't really explain, but the code explains itself pretty well.

The point is it works, it simply makes <Esc> work immediately even when on Terminal. I believe if you do have mappings set to <Esc> it'll give you time to do those as well. However I'm not sure.

EDIT

Studied a bit and I can now explain it. Basically, if you're not using a GUI (like MacVim) then when you enter insert mode the ttimeoutlen will be set to 0. Meaning that as soon as you click <Esc> that'll work. However once you're in normal mode then it'll set the ttimeoutlen to the number you prefer, letting you do mappings with <Esc>.

Perfect solution I think, since if you have mappings in insert mode it'll be using control or something like that.

EDIT 2

Here's the code:

set timeout " Do time out on mappings and others set timeoutlen=2000 " Wait {num} ms before timing out a mapping  " When you’re pressing Escape to leave insert mode in the terminal, it will by " default take a second or another keystroke to leave insert mode completely " and update the statusline. This fixes that. I got this from: " https://powerline.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tipstricks.html#vim if !has('gui_running')     set ttimeoutlen=10     augroup FastEscape         autocmd!         au InsertEnter * set timeoutlen=0         au InsertLeave * set timeoutlen=1000     augroup END endif 

With time I've removed the condition that the GUI isn't running and it still works as far as I can tell.