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Comment by iamevn | Hacker News Reader

Huh, I wouldn't have been able to say what zz does from memory despite using it all the time. I think this is because I am on my phone, away from a keyboard and it's the sort of motion where I don't ever even think about what key I'm hitting, I just do it. I'd need to be at a keyboard to access my muscle memory.

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I had the exact same experience, but if I pictured pressing them in my mind's eye, I realized what they did.

It reminds me of some bilingual kids I know that can understand their dad's language perfectly, but they have a really hard time speaking it (since they always reply in their mom's language). You only learn what you practice.

I was thinking about writing down some visual keybindings map precisely for that reason, I have gathered a bunch of muscle memory about shortcuts I set up but it would take a bit of effort to remember what one was if I didn't use it for a while

I'd recommend against trying to memorize Vim keybindings by position.

1. If you want to learn a non-QWERTY layout (e.g. Dvorak or Colemak), you're going to have trouble. (Although some users to try and go to the effort of remapping to suit the layout).

2. Similarly, you might also have trouble if you get a fancy keyboard that doesn't use a row-stagger, like a kinesis, moonlander, crkbd etc.

3. Many of vim's keybindings accreted mnemonically in the first place. There's often a mnemonic explanation or back-explanation for every single keybind. Many people communicate with them ("just yank those four lines"), and they form a sort of vocabulary to the "language" of vim normal and visual modes.

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