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Comment by masukomi | Hacker News Reader

hjkl (not jkl;) are a) ergonomically bad because they are one key off of home row position and b) completely useless for anyone who types with a different keyboard such as Dvorak, and presumably some foreign language ones.

also, HJKL actually IS the arrow keys... but it's the arrow keys from an ancient computer that no longer exists. People get all uppity about it being the "right" way but there's no logical argument that supports hjkl on a modern computer OTHER than the fact that it's the default.

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I disagree with this. The j key is the most used out of hjkl, and it's under your right index finger. I do most horizontal movement with left hand (primarily w and b) anyway.

Actually there was a time when everbody knew the ASCII table and hjkl were the control codes for backspace, linefeed, vertical tab and formfeed which map pretty closely to the 4 arrow directions. The first two are keyboard oriented codes, the next two are more line-printer codes but the early teletype terminals were just a printer with a keyboard so it made perfct sense.

In the vi world, these keys didn't really mean anything. They were just easy mnemonic associations to memorize because there was a system of relatedness to all of it.

Completely agree. Personally, I'm trying to spread the One True Way of ijkl navigation, but it's slow going...

I'm curious: what do you use to enter insert mode then?

Insert mode is for noobs. ;)

Just recently I've been starting to rely on 'a' and 'A'. Maybe I could switch to ijkl

In default vim, i inserts to the left of the cursor. In ijkl, you simply map h to insert left of the cursor. It's even on the left of your new arrow keys so the mental map works better too!

I'm a huge ijkl fan, because I learned wasd long before I learned vim.

Huh! This is really neat. Thanks for taking the time to evangelize. I might have to try this for a day.

out of interest - as hjkl are one offset from the default jkl; home row position, do you opt to use the index for both h and j or shift your hand one key over to the left?

I notice from observing other people type that there is an aversion to moving hand position, whereas the idea of moving hand position is not unfathomable to me, perhaps as I have played piano and violin. For example, I generally use middle finger to hit esc to exit escape mode. This may seem counter-intuitive and could well be thanks to the dimensions of my hand, but I am able to reach esc with middle finger without moving the wrist. That means I can hit esc and find the home row while still touch typing. Similarly, displacing my entire hand for hjkl isn't that uncomfortable and is certainly more comfortable than trying to use both h and j for h and j.

I use Ctrl+[ instead of Esc, since I find that far faster and requiring less hand movement.

I'm not averse to moving hand position, and I don't use the strict one-finger-per-key rules either, but I do try to minimise hand movement overall since it means faster typing.

Nice trick: remap Capslock to Esc.

My keyboard has one minuscule control key so I prefer to map control to caps lock, but I map 'jj' to escape in insert mode, which makes it super quick to switch modes.

I find that people who consider remapping capslock to anything else are people who don't know how to touch type. If you are in that camp I would strongly recommend spending the time to retrain yourself to learn how to touch type with home row position. You'll find that the capslock becomes a much more valuable key. You'll also find that your wrists are happier. It's an annoying time investment,but it's a valuable one. I combined it with switching to Dvorak... which really hampered my typing speed for a couple weeks but also helped improve my wrist happiness.

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