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Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, though. I do like the simplicity and the overall approach, support for the mouse, and so on. I would use this. But I don't know if I can give up mode based editing... need to delete 3 lines? d3d. Search with /string. Get the next result with n. It's just so much faster than learning a million modifier keys. Maybe there's room for something in between this and Vim?

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Just to play devil's advocate, these 3 examples don't seem much faster than Shift+(Del,Del,Del), Ctrl+F,string, and F3, respectively.

They are easily reachable from the home row. Thus less finger/arm movement.

It depends what you call the "home row" and where you keep your fingers.

If you expect to use these shortcuts (typically with the outer fingers of your hands) your hands will rest at a slightly higher position in your keyboard, with the pinkies near Esc and Del, and the thumbs near the spacebar. (Other fingers over the letters.)

I guess it depends on what you've trained yourself to do.

I don't think I've seen anyone with their fingers stretched out or diagonal like that as a 'home row' position, though. It makes much more sense to 'default' to having your hands somewhat straight and on the keys you're likely to press more regularly (the (center) letter row).

key chords, F-keys, waiting for windows to pop up, those are all extra things that take time and get in the way. My fingers need to stay near their home on the home row.

> It's just so much faster than learning a million modifier keys.

I'm a long time vim key bound app user but this just makes me chuckle as vim users have already gone through learning million keybindings before they can be fluent with its use... not to mention the weird defaults.

Something like Amp [1] or Kakoune [2] ? As with vim they are modal, but one needs to press less keystrokes and they are more intuitive as they use object_letter -> action_letter, not action_letter -> object_letter model.

[1] - https://amp.rs/

[2] - https://github.com/mawww/kakoune

Yeah, I was joking, but honestly I'd love to use this as a nice out-of-the-box solution if it had Vim keybindings. I use Emacs with Vim keybindings on my dev machine, and VSCode for most coding, so I only really use 'proper' Vim on my servers. and I keep not finding the time to set things up properly there...

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