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Comment by xiwenc | Hacker News Reader

Assuming you're not using some very basic text editor; good ones have skip word. For instance 'w' in vim, or 'ctrl + right' in vscode.

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True, but nothing is simpler than an arrow key.

This is not really true; ‘w’ is one row up from the home row and is easily accessible with the middle or ring finger. An arrow key is a hand-shift or an awkward pinky stretch away. Vim keybindings were explicitly designed to be simpler than arrow keys once you’ve gotten over the learning curve.

Unfortunately vim is not very useful for coding and debugging iOS apps. Or Android, or Windows for that matter.

I haven't done any iOS development, so perhaps I'm expecting too much; but surely there is an IDE that has a vim-mode plugin? Every IDE/editor I've used—all JetBrains products, Atom, Visual Studio, Eclipse...—has a vim plugin readily available. They're rarely perfect (they tend to behave weirdly with IDE autocompletion and the like), but they're more than adequate for basic text navigation.

> but they're more than adequate for basic text navigation

I really think basic text navigation is no longer a problem since the the adoption of PC keyboards in the 1980s and 1990s. Key arrows are easy to find blindly except maybe on some screwed up laptop designs.

Perhaps our definitions of "basic text navigation" are different. I'd include capabilities such as "jump six words to the right, based on natural word boundaries" and "jump six words to the right, based on whitespace only". Oh, and "jump to the end of this statement that's enclosed by parentheses".

Not trying to start a vim-vs-whatever war here, though I suppose that's inevitable in a discussion of tabs-vs-spaces...

W is as simple as an arrow key.

But switching between input mode and text mode is not (for me, at least, as an untrained user)

I deeply appreciate the automation vim & co. offer, but many people, like me, simply have no interest in climbing up the learning curve for editors.

That’s a great point, but learning arrow key function varies based on the app I use. So if I have to learn arrow to move around indents, I may as well learn the command to move between words.

I struggle with trying to get others to change their files because a particular program I like and use a lot handles their file a certain way. This reminds me of the olden days of the old Microsoft way where the solution seemed to be around making every app respond in the way way so it was possible to guarantee what arrow does across all apps.

But that way lost and now files are used in all sorts of weird wonderful ways.

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