> 'hjkl' always seemed awkward and dumb to me.
Except that you press J, K and even L way more times than H and thus is makes a lot of sense having them right there under your strongest fingers.
Except that you press J, K and even L way more times than H and thus is makes a lot of sense having them right there under your strongest fingers.
In all seriousness, though, I personally don't like having to reach with my index finger to move left. I tend to think of 'jkl;' as being a more efficient set of arrow-keys. (Where, with the arrow keys, your index finger goes left, ring-finger goes right, and middle finger goes up-down).
If you can hack it with 'hjkl' more power to you, but I found it extremely annoying to have to 'reset' my hand position every time I wanted to type text in insert mode.
What do you mean, please? Do you mean you were resting your right finger over H?
Did you not consider keeping your hand in the standard place? I very rarely use h, and when I do it is a simple moment of the index finger. Backspace has nearly the same functionality as h, and movement keys like b, ^, and I (enter insert mode at the beginning of the line) are typically much more useful.