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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it still be difficult? The HJKL row makes sense to remap to DHTN. But other commands are mnemonic and would make more sense to follow the key to its new location.

So you have collisions. ("Does Y mean "yank"? Or does it now mean "to"? Well "to" can't be T anymore, because that's now the motion up command.")

So you have to either remap everything back to qwerty positions, and learn the new mnemonics, or keep the letter associations the same, and give up on the clustered motion commands.

I'm thinking it's probably better to do the latter, but I'd love to hear from vimmers that use non-qwerty layouts.

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I'm not a power vim user but sticking to the default keybinds on Dvorak isn't so bad. JK are still right next to each other, and HL are on the right index and pinky, respectively, so the basic spatial relationships between the keys are somewhat preserved.

I find that remapping shortcuts is generally not worth it. Yeah, undo/cut/copy/paste are weird and that sucks, but it's better than fighting every application you ever use, on every machine, including machines you SSH into, until you die.

For gaming, on the other hand, mixed up keybinds are intolerable. I just switch back to QWERTY for that.

I type Dvorak and simply use the default Vim key bindings. Vim defaults are weird with Dvorak, but significantly more intuitive than what the situation is with Colemak. Here's the Vim and Dvorak inspired custom keymap I use on my programmable keyboard: https://github.com/1MachineElf/qmk_firmware/tree/_sb4dv/keyb...

I've been on Dvorak full-time since 2008, and even though I generally don't use vim itself for programming, I do still use vim-mode in my editors and IDE. But I gave up on using hjkl long before switching to Dvorak, and I've always just either used motions like w/b/f/t/n/etc, or moved to the arrow keys for shorter motions. This also lets me share more of the muscle memory for movements when I'm typing into standard text boxes like this.

Kind of ironic. I'm on a 75-key keyboard, with no arrow keys. Instead, they're mapped to a layer under (drumroll...) HJKL.

So even if I ever did make the jump to Colemack or Dvorak, I'd probably keep those mappings to the same physical keys. Working in vim, I'd just use my "arrow" keys rather than the native motion keymappings.

I also try to avoid using them in the first place (instead using w/b/f/t/n/etc), but sometimes it's faster to just tap the key a few times rather than "formulate a plan" to reach my target

What kind of build is 75 keys without arrows?

A 60% (no arrow keys) has 61 keys (ANSI) and the next “bigger” one, a 65% has 67 keys and usually already arrow keys.

Is it some non-standard ergo mech build?

> Is it some non-standard ergo mech build?

Basically this. Not really ergo, other than being ortholinear and having space between the resting positions of my hands.

Here's a photo: https://imgur.com/0UBSi74

I've been using vim user for about 10 years and a colemak user for probably 9 years. At first I remapped the hjkl keys to maintain the muscle memory for movement, but ended up going down the rabbit hole of remaps. Eventually I gave up and reverted to the default keybindings. At first it was weird, but after a month or so I got used to it.

I would definitely advise against remapping vim bindings. The first is because if you ever has to use vim on a non-colemak machine, figuring out the keys will be very painful. Secondly because vim has influenced a lot of other programs (man, less, gvim, etc) and most of them are much harder to rebind if they even support it at all.

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