better-escape.vim VS vim-dispatch

This issue is only cosmetic as the other commenter explained. vim won't insert the character until you indicate you're not invoking the keymap (either by waiting or by typing other characters).

If you want a plugin that makes it so that the j appears immediately regardless of whether you're trying to invoke the keymap or not, you can use something like https://github.com/nvim-zh/better-escape.vim

better-escape is what you need then. One tiny plugin, one line of config in your vimrc/init file, and the delay is gone.

Then I came across better-escape.vim, a very recent plugin that does exactly what I want. With core implementation of less than 100 lines of vimscript, it is much more reasonable. People who have better things to do would probably stop here and be content with this perfectly good plugin, but not me. Although the plugin gets the job done, it essentially accomplishes a one-line functionality that is imap jk . For such a simple functionality like this, we really shouldn't be relying on plugins. I want something ultra-simple, something ultra-compact, something that can be put directly into your .vimrc.

Not used this but seem people say it's useful for this usecase https://github.com/jdhao/better-escape.vim

Hi, fellow reditters, I am the author of better-escape.vim, which is created about 9 months ago. In fact, I have announced it in my eariler post.

You can use the plugin better-escape.vim'.

I have used the plugin https://github.com/jdhao/better-escape.vim

Ok so I apologize if this isn’t super helpful, but I remember reading this about how to write a function to map jk to escape without having that annoying lag you talk about. You could maybe use this same approach but alter it a bit to make two spaces turn into an underscore but without lag. The author of that post also made a plugin with that idea, so maybe it could help you?

Tis is good for the compilation to make it async( otherwise it blocks) https://github.com/tpope/vim-dispatch it wraps around the built in make/makeprg feature. Would recommend that you dont do it with large builds/outputs.

vim-dispatch by the legend Tim Pope. send the task to the background, keep using editor. once the task is finished, it output to qflist buffer

The other answer here covers everything you need, but if you want a plugin-based solution you might be interested in vim-dispatch which runs command line tools asynchronously, and offers the option to run the command in the background instead with :Dispatch!.

You should check :h compiler :h make and :h 'errorformat'. You could also check vim dispatch, a plugin that enhances this features

Also plugin supports asynchronous execution (using terminal, jobs or vim-dispatch).

Do note that :make is blocking, and you need to wait until it finishes before it sends you back to the editor. If you want it to be asynchronouns, you can install vim-dispatch + vim-dispatch-neovim for Neovim support in vim-dispatch.

if you want something to work out of the box, is async and is already configured per language, check out TPope's dispatch

For long-running programs, like compiling, or running full test suites, or running terraform on a decently sized infrastructure project, I may run them with :Make (courtesy of tpope/vim-dispatch) so I can keep working on the project while the external program is running. If I'm in an environment without vim plugins, I may spawn a new tmux pane/window. As a last resort, I will ctrl-z/fg if I don't have tmux on the remote system (e.g. dev containers).