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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

Some things seem unnecessarily unintuitive to me about the shortcuts. For instance, using 4 in-line keys for navigating a 2D space seems like a wasted opportunity. Every video game ever came to the conclusion that the inverse-T layout is ideal for this task.

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I mean, putting all they keys in the home row is admirable but the up/down placement seems so counter-intuitive! Almost everywhere I see arrow keys put in a line up comes first…

^H in ASCII is backspace (move carriage to the left), and ^J is linefeed (move carriage down), so h-j were completely intuitive to people who already knew ASCII (i.e. everybody) and then it just makes sense to continue the row of other cursor movements.

"intuitive" doesn't mean "I was born knowing it"

vi was written long before any video game ever, and the arrow keys on the ADM-3A terminal that Bill Joy used in 1976 were actually on the hjkl keys, so it made sense at the time.

https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys

Interesting! I can imagine it would be quite a bit more intuitive with the arrows written there. It almost makes it seem like the touted benefit of having these keys on the home row is essentially ad-hoc reasoning, and maybe this 35-year-old design decision should be re-visited since even keyboard manufacturers realized this was not the best system decades ago.

Just don't use h and l, really. There are a lot of ways to travel horizontally in vim. The fact that up/down are besides each other is really awesome, since that is the movement you will be doing most of the time.

> For instance, using 4 in-line keys for navigating a 2D space seems like a wasted opportunity.

It's actually awesome because your fingers are all on one row. It feels extremely intuitive after a while.

I don't know, I mean I believe you can learn anything and it will seem intuitive after a while, but I feel like more video-game speed runners and e-sport athletes would map their movement controls to the home row if this was really an advantage.

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