Remapping Esc to Tab in Spacemacs

Question

I'm accustomed to remapping Esc to Tab in Vim. In Spacemacs this can be done with:

(define-key evil-insert-state-map [tab] 'evil-normal-state)
(define-key evil-visual-state-map [tab] 'evil-normal-state)

in dotspacemacs/config in .spacemacs. This leaves me with the option of pressing C-i when Tab is really needed (quite rarely in my case).

However, shells in Spacemacs are also run in vi-mode, and there Tab key is really convenient for completion, obviously.

How can i either

• Run shells in emacs-mode
• or disable Tab remapping in shells while retaining it elsewhere?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Seems that i simply did not enable Spacemacs's own shell layer. This is what i have now in dotspacemacs-configuration-layers:

(shell :variables
             shell-default-height 30
             shell-default-position 'bottom
             shell-default-shell 'multi-term)

With this configuration, Tab works as Tab, even when though it's remapped to Esc in my configuration as shown in the question. Which seems nice.