are essential to me... press both at the same time and you exit insert mode regardless of which one gets pressed slightly faster and you never leave the home row and if you press it when you are not in insert mode it's basically a nop unless you are at the start or end of the file. even if you are you might move down or up a line accidentally but i've never had that happen personally.
I tried that, but found it annoying to occasionally get kicked out of insert mode while writing. I ended up rebinding Caps Lock to Escape instead, with Shift+CL to toggle caps; I quite like this rebinding even outside Vim. Two lines in autohotkey on Windows, or setxkbmap in X11.
This is the first thing in my config, whenever I try to setup in a new system. Now "kj" and ":w" has become more like a muscle memory, even when I am just staring at the abyss...
inoremap kj <Esc>
are essential to me... press both at the same time and you exit insert mode regardless of which one gets pressed slightly faster and you never leave the home row and if you press it when you are not in insert mode it's basically a nop unless you are at the start or end of the file. even if you are you might move down or up a line accidentally but i've never had that happen personally.