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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

This sounds very alluring but having to deal with setting up VIM in every environment or going to a new environment with VIM not set up sounds so painful.

I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK

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Interestingly enough, the two vim bindings you probably use most, up/down (j/k) are actually positioned right next to each other on a dvorak keyboard. The rest take a bit of getting used to. You'd be surprised how natural vim feels on a dvorak keyboard.

> I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK

Not really. Most vim keybindings follow mnemonics (like `di"`). Dvorak still has 'jk' adjacent to each other; and `h` to the left of `l`.

There are several keyboard shortcuts which are nicer with QWERTY left-hand only: (Ctrl Z, X, C, V, S, F, W, ... T?, A).

For two-hands-on-keyboard, these are less of an issue than for keyboard+mouse workflows.

I use VIM on Dvorak, having [shift], [:;], [q] next to each other is awesome.

Having [a], [i], [y], [p], [x] all on the left hand is also awesome. It's a bummer that [d] is on the other hand, though I could reach it in a pinch with my left hand if I need to.

I don't need the fake QWERTY arrow keys, the real arrow keys work.

The "fake" arrow keys are nice so you don't have to move your hands. They are pretty decently placed in dvorak though, so it's no issue.

Both vi-style and emacs-style key bindings work well under Dvorak without alteration. (Why are people capitalizing it? It's not an acronym, it's a name.)

I use Vim and Dvorak. It only took a couple of weeks to get used to. Never felt a need to customise Vim to change any keybindings strong enough to do so. And am happy I didn’t. For all these years I’ve been using them both together with just the default key bindings.

My vimrc has a specific section just for handling this:

    """""""""""" DVORAK FTW LOLZ! "
    noremap d h
    noremap h j
    noremap t k
    noremap n l
    noremap k d
    noremap l n
    noremap j t
    noremap ^Wd ^Wh
    noremap ^Wh ^Wj
    noremap ^Wt ^Wk
    noremap ^Wn ^Wl
    inoremap ^] ^[A
    inoremap ð ^N

That's all I use for handling dvorak. This has been in my config since I switched to git from hg in 2007, dunno how long before that.

> I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK

This is why I don't use vim; I had been touch-typing in Dvorak for years by the time I encountered it, and vim's layout felt like it would require a painful degree of brute memorization.

I know maybe 0.5 percent of what vim (neovim these days) can do and between that and a sane config my text editing skills have gotten at least 4 times better compared to a regular text editor. You can just learn the things that matter to you plus how to save and exit.

It's been years since I last used Vim (happy Emacs user now), but I don't see much of an issue, j and k are still next to each other and for moving in a line f, F, t, and T are nicer. Also solidus, of course.

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