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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

I persisted with this approach for a decade. Enlightenment came when I let it go.

Even after 10+ years of daily use, I never managed to make navigating via hjkl work naturally with my brain — I need “up” to be physically above “down”. So I set up key bindings for the classic “inverted T” formation, dealt with the secondary effects, and I’m much more comfortable. https://github.com/rectang/dotfiles/blob/30e0a41714c34416f10...

Dare I say I use vim more like it was intended to be used with this new setup, as my right hand remains in place and is not constantly flying to the arrow keys and back.

Now I struggle a bit when I have to work on a stock vi, but that’s a very small part of what I do.

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I use hjkl to scroll 90% of the time when using my browser. Having it on the middle of the keyboard where your hand rests make a lot more sense to me than weirdly angling your hand at the bottom right of my MacBook.

I just wish hjkl scrolling worked for those of us who do not use QWERTY

I used hjkl scrolling for about a decade with Dvorak. In fact, I learned to use Vim for the first time on Dvorak. The muscle memory makes it work just fine, even when not all the keys are on the home row.

It, um, can, but you have to kind of not pay attention and pretend that the letters are somehow important and ignore what your fingers are actually doing on the keyboard. At least n=1, my brain was willing to accept that j=down and k=up and not worry about the fact that they're not even next to each other. That said, if I could go back in time I would tell my younger self to either use vi/m or non-qwerty, but not both.

For my n=1, the j and k were the easy ones. It is h and l (especially the L) that never got wired right.

I learned Colemak about ten years ago but only got into vim in the past three years. Does anyone use vim with eMacs bindings?

I found this forced me to use vim's natural language more rather than relying on hjkl for the majority of my navigation, since it was ergonomically uncomfortable and I wanted to preserve vim's mnemonics by not rebinding.

I... you remap those to DHTN because they're positional and not a neumonic.

Wouldn’t it be HNEI to be in the same position? But good catch.

Forgive me, but if you've got a MacBook (and no attached keyboard, by the sound of it), why not just use two-finger scrolling on the very very nice touch pad?

I rarely use the mouse. Both my hands are always resting on either side of the trackpad with my fingers on the home row by default (rarely moving from this position):

https://ergonomictrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/prope...

Even clicking on links...w/ Tridacty you just press "f" then all the links get have a 2 or 3 letter combination to open them:

https://i.imgur.com/xfWRbC7.png

tabnext/tabprev is shift-J/K etc. history Back/Forward is shift-H/L... those 4 groups (clicking, history, tabs, and scrolling) = 90%+ of browser usage

Using the mouse is way less efficient. Learning how to browser purely with keyboard is very rewarding.

Ever since I learned how to use the Miryoku layout, I've been using vim with the hjkl navigation-keys shifted one position to the right. Those are also my arrow keys on a separate layer in the keyboard firmware. And I never looked back, this is how it really should be!

What kind of keyboard do you have or what are some favorite ones you have tried? Been looking at bastardkb.com a lot recently, but feel frozen with choice.

Scandalous, but I love it! (:

``` " Make carat easier to type. inoremap <C-a> ^ ```

I do a lot of LaTeX note taking in Vim. Consider this a hyper-local optimization. ^_^

Minor nit: it's "caret", we're not measuring diamonds here.

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