Meta key maping and and timing issues

Comment from a colleague; I’m wondering if there is a solution (he’s thinking of moving to emacs - ouch!)

The problem I’ve got is that I’m a meta key user, but you can’t map meta or alt properly via CLI vim (I’m a tmux user, so definitely CLI vim), so you have to use . The problem there is that has a delay behind it, so if I map j and I press j after pressing escape, my j sequence will fire “erroneously”. However, if I remove timeoutlen and ttimeoutlen, then my leader key sequences fail because vim won’t wait for the leader sequence.

And regardless of how I escape (Esc, C-[), it will still assume the timeout, meaning that I have to wait like 500ms before performing any actions, or risk a meta sequence firing.

Basically, I can use meta keys and forget my leader, or I can just use my leader and forget my meta keys.

He’s using CLI vim with tmux… thanks for any help!

If you’re a tmux-er, I think you just have to forego the meta key.

Thanks, @geoffharcourt… that’s what I thought. He did look (briefly) at emacs but found: “The emacs manual has around 1000 lines of just manuals. I might be in over my head!” and moved back to vim :=)