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Comment by kataklasm | Hacker News Reader

I'm a (n)vim user as well and have been using Colemak for some time now. Since I couldn't get used to the weirdly arranged hjkl layout with Colemak, I've been using some remaps that make everything very nice to use on a Colemak layout. Feel free to message for more information.

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I'm also a vim user and I recently switched to Colemak-DH, but I didn't remap anything. It took a long time to get used to the new vim layout (longer than the time it took to learn Colemak itself), but now that I'm comfortable with it, I can be fluent without any remaps.

Did you remap just hjkl or anything else? I see that there even are some vim-colemak plugins, but honestly just the idea that I'll have to think about it kinda intimidates me. Almost every key in vim has a meaning, most of them are kinda semantic (webdrtfi...), most used are on the home row too, and it's not like I think about letters anyway (funnily, yesterday I use Ctrl+y & Ctrl+e, which I didn't use for a very long time and honestly didn't even remember them, but my fingers somehow did). I feel okay about the idea that I'll have to learn to type again, but learning to use vim again, which is specifically tuned for qwerty, that feels a bit too much.

This

> it's not like I think about letters anyway

is exactly why the following is of little use and is a design mistake for heavily used keybinds

>Almost every key in vim has a meaning, most of them are kinda semantic (webdrtfi...),

Which unfortunately has persisted for ages reminding us yet again how defaults matter :(

(and due to the high frequency of their use the arrow keys shouldn't require you to move a finger off the home keys, so jkl; is better than hjkl; (in qwerty))

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