Question

In Vim you often need to assign a key for your own custom action. But there are so many key combinations that already have an action mapped to them by default. How do you choose free key combinations when you need to assign you custom action to one?

In these situations I usually get lost and just assign my action to a custom command instead of a key, like :docoolstuff instead of a simple keypress.

And, by the way, do you often remap a default action to use a custom action on this key combination instead?

Answer 1

Personally, I bind custom command to leader - {key}. For example:

let mapleader = ','
nnoremap <leader>s       : so $MYVIMRC<CR>
nnoremap <leader>v       : tabe $MYVIMRC<CR>

I can press ,v to open vimrc in a new tab.