I write extremely fast and use arrow keys (and all kinds of vim shortcuts).
> it's also the likely visual/mental cost of looking away from your screen to aid in positioning the hand
I never look at my keyboard when using vim.
I don't even have to move to reach the ESC key because I use ctrl-[ instead. Even if you have perfect memory and perfect motor control to enable hand repositioning, just the act of moving the hand from one location to another and back will cost time that "power" vim users don't waste.
For some people, having your flow state disrupted can cause a very long delay as you have to figure out what you were doing all over again.
I'm all for people using the tools they want, and I can see the appeal of a highly customized environment you know well, but I struggle with this logic I always hear treating the mouse like some sort of world ending interruption to text input.
At that point does a sneeze interrupt your flow state?
Given that it is an involuntary spasm, then yes, it does.
But alright, just sounds dreadful I guess, to be unable to stay in flow due to the most minute actions or occurrences.
When I started my career, it was the tail end of the era of the Typing Pool in large companies... when a room full of clerical people would be hammering away on electric typewriters for a full working day, but not dropping like flies with cases of RSI. So perhaps staying near the home row perhaps has other advantages.
I try and use Vim keymaps whenever possible with the dev tools available to me, and to keep hands on the keyboard whenever possible. I certainly notice less fatigue than the old days when I used to type, mouse, type, mouse.
Typing can also cause RSI, and in fact if you look at the risk factors for RSI, way more boxes are ticked by keeping a mostly static position on a keyboard than with occasional movements of a mouse (especially the parts about leaving pressure on part of the body)
I’d also imagine typewriters are very different from normal keyboards in usage, and typists were very focused on ergonomics
There’s also the fact that RSI probably wasn’t as commonly diagnosed as it is today.
On the other hand, I always thought the opposite.
My hands fly around everywhere. My right hand goes from the main keys area to the home/end/arrow keys and the mouse pretty frequently. I keep my forearms perfectly parallel to the ground with close to 0 resistance, then I mostly use my shoulder and elbow to move my forearms, which leads to my hands being in a different spot.
I also never strain to reach any combo because I just move my hands instead of trying to break my wrist to press something like tilde + g with my ring / pinky and pointer fingers.
Been doing this for 20+ years and I have no arm, wrist, hand or finger pain and this is with years of gaming abuse where I was clicking and doing repeated key presses for 12+ hours for entire summers back in the day.
But if you ask me to type with my hands on the home row, I feel a very unnatural strain on the top of my hand when I move my fingers. After a minute it's painful. I dunno how anyone can do that without injuring themselves.
The thing is I switch all the time between vim and my terminal (it's complicated by let's say I mainly use one terminal tab for everything I'm currently writing) so using the home row I would have to switch all the time between home row and arrows when using the terminal (and other programs) (I guess I could add vim bindings to every single thing I use: web browser, terminal emulator, pry, irb, tmux, etc etc. but doesn't seem appealing to me).
The escape key isn't an issue either because I don't use the home row, so no need to remap that too.
I think this misconception comes from the manual pushing people to use the home row.
I don't claim I'm the fastest writer ever, but there are a lot of compromises I'm not willing to make (I could use vim tabs/windows, I could use Ctrl-D to switch files, I could use GVim, have the main files always open, etc.). I'm pretty sure everyone works differently and this workflow works very well for me.
What I don't like is this constant shaming of arrow vim users and people that keep saying it's only for beginners (and the manual pushing people to use the home row).
Starting with version 8.0, vim has a :terminal command which will open a new split window with a terminal. You can switch between the terminal and other vim windows using ctrl-w j, ctrl-w k, etc. You can enter normal mode in the terminal using the ctrl-w N key combination. In normal mode, you can scroll back and copy text into a vim register of your choice (default is "). Then you can either paste it in another window like you normally would, or you can paste it in your terminal by pressing i to return to terminal insert mode and pressing ctrl-w " " (where the second " is the name of the register that contains the yanked text you want to paste).
You can also adopt these keybindings inside vim with the tpope/vim-rsi plugin. This approach has been quite effective in my experience.
Thinking that you require perfect memory to use arrow keys while programming is just hyperbole.