Can I use SPACE as mapleader in VIM?

Question

From http://items.sjbach.com/319/configuring-vim-right I got that you were supposed to be able to use Space as the mapleader in vim. I\'ve tried but it does not s

Answer 1

Mapleader is a Vim string variable. To use space as leader, you must escape the special character.

let mapleader = "\"

For more info see,

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/eval.html#expr-quote

EDIT:

This no longer works for me in my version of Vim. Even with the suggestion in the comments of unmapping the spacebar in normal mode by running nnoremap .

I ending up going with the solution given in the answer below.

map