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Comment by thought_alarm | Hacker News Reader

How do you deal with the arrow keys?

I like the feel of the keyboard, but I found absolutely no way to orient my fingers over the arrow keys. There is no way tell whether I'm hitting the up arrow or the right shift.

As someone who works with text, it's a deal breaker for me.

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The whole keyboard feels like that to me. When they made the keys bigger they basically took away the ability to 'feel' the outside edges of the keys and know where your hands are. It's very disoriented and most of my typing errors are off by one.

Yes I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this. The new left/right cursor layout is awful for me, I keep having to look down at the keyboard.

>How do you deal with the arrow keys?

I'm a vim user, so its hjkl all the way.. for the most part. And while I do agree that the older invert-T configuration of the arrow keys was ergonomic and sensible, I've found myself not having any problem with locating the arrow keys on the new 2017-rMBP due to the fact that the gap between up/down is also pretty easy to find by feel.

I guess I might be a little more tolerant for this change than most, since I try to change my keyboard every 6 months (for RSI reasons) anyway, and am also a keys/synth player with a room full of diverse haptic interfaces. But I do understand the frustration of having these ergonomics yanked out from under us by Apple ..

Yes I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this.

Because it's a subjective matter of personal opinion and not all people everywhere have identical opinions. Yet it is often presented, especially in places like HN, as an objective opinion that the new MBP is 100% completely, totally, permanently and irrevocably unusable for any person, for any use case, in any logically-possible universe.

Perhaps that is not the case, and instead it is the case that there are things you dislike which other people like.

I hadn't really used the cursors until now so I thought I would check. I agree with you, they're very awkward. When I press the left my brain then expects that the up and down keys will be the same size key, and I end up hitting the shift.

I seldom use the keys in day to day typing, so it's not a big issue, but they feel very wrong.

Apart from that the keyboard has grown on me, but I have changed my style to type much more lightly, partially because of how noisy the keyboard is.

In almost every Mac OS X application/text field, the emacs keybindings (Ctrl-p,Ctrl-n,Ctrl-b,Ctrl-f for up, down, left, right, respectively) work. I, personally, very rarely use the arrow keys for navigating text.

Ctrl-a, Ctrl-e, Ctrl-k and Ctrl-y also all work for beginning of line, end of line, kill and yank.

Same here. As I wrote in this [1] comment, the touch bar being in the way + no escape key + uniform arrow keys = very frustrating touch-typing experience.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098257

Don't use arrow keys, it shifts the center of gravity when typing. You want to use hjkl for movement, even better, try not to use hjkl at all and use movement commends such as w b e etc for movement.

First thing I do when setting up vim. 1. unbind arrow keys 2. bind jk to Esc 3. Set up tmux + vim integration with clipboard / mouse support

Love the new MBP the keyboard is great to type on.

I'd never heard of using hjkl for cardinal directional movement.

I am familiar with ijkl where jl <—> W E and ik <—> N S (used in Lode Runner and BurgerTime for the Apple IIe).

I honestly don't know: is hjkl standard in a command line app?

It's the standard in vim.

Yeah, in vi: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys...

Only for vi users. Everybody else thinks they're weird.

I've had a new Macbook since it came out in April 2015. Still not used to the arrow keys.

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