There’s a special kind of friction reserved for developers on UK Mac keyboards. You’re in Vim, deep in a config file, reaching for # to comment out a line… and nothing. Or worse, a £ appears, mocking you with its GBP confidence.
The fix takes thirty seconds. The reflection takes longer.
The fix
# lives on Alt+3 on a UK Mac. Most terminals intercept Option for their own purposes, so the keystroke never reaches Vim. Three ways out:
- Terminal.app: Preferences → Profiles → Keyboard. Make sure “Use Option as Meta key” is unticked. Yes UNTICKED!!
- iTerm2: Preferences → Profiles → Keys → Left Option Key set to
Normal. - Universal escape hatch: In insert mode,
Ctrl+Vthen35(ASCII code for#). Works in any terminal, any config, any decade.
The digraph Ctrl+K then ## also works, for anyone who enjoys feeling like a wizard.
Here’s what interests me more than the fix: I lost about four (maybe 10) minutes to this before I stopped and solved it properly. Four minutes is nothing. Over a career, four minutes repeated across a hundred tiny frictions becomes the difference between someone who ships and someone who yaks.
Developer productivity isn’t really about 10x frameworks or the latest AI pair programmer. It’s about the cumulative tax of small indignities, the shortcut that doesn’t fire, the terminal that swallows a keystroke, the config that resets on every update. Each one is trivial. Together they’re the reason Friday afternoon feels like wading through treacle.
The discipline I’m trying to build: when something breaks my flow twice, fix it. Not next sprint. Now. Open the preferences, write the mapping, commit the dotfile. The compound interest on removed friction is absurd.