Lost left/right cursor keys in VIM insert mode

Try this:

:imap <C-Tab> <Esc>:tabn<CR>

That will leave you in normal mode after switching to the next tab. You could instead use this:

:imap <C-Tab> <C-O>:tabn<CR>

which will put you back into insert mode in the next tab at the position where you left the cursor in that tab.

Another upvote for @garyjohn's comment, here.

By following that path, you are certainly shooting yourself in the foot. I see at least two big mistakes in your approach.

• As @garyjohn wrote, you are "fighting" against Vim's most crucial aspect. Modality is at the core of everything that makes it the awesome text editor it is. If you consider its proverbially steep learning curve, actively going against its design won't get you far up.

• Like many others, you focus your "dumbing down Vim" effort on movements like <up>, <down> and friends. Vim has much better ways to move around in and between buffers: wWeEbB/?tTfF{}[] and so on. All these motions give you super powers. All these motions depend on modality in one way or another.

  Rejecting these incredibly useful tools is a very bad mistake in and of itself. Remapping them would be both very tough and utterly worthless.

  FYI, when I started Vim, I spent months trying to turn it into a TextMate clone. Trying to create insert mode mappings for everything was probably one the most frustrating endeavour of my whole career. I learned two things in the process, though:

  1. my beloved TextMate was seriously underpowered compared to Vim so it made absolutely no sense to dumb down Vim, and…

  2. modes freaking rule.

Accept Vim's philosophy instead of rejecting it. Or reject it and use Sublime Text 2 instead, for what we care.