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Comment by drtz | Hacker News Reader

I once did a lunch and learn at work where I tried to teach coworkers how to use vim efficiently. It turned out to be the absolute worst lunch and learn I ever did.

It's just so unintuitive and trying to teach it in a "here are some good shortcuts that will save you time" way was a near-total waste.

vim is the closest any editor comes to interfacing directly with my brain. Once you learn to make your neurons fire in the right way to move the cursor to the right spot, it's easy and there's no better way to edit code. Describing the neuron firing order to someone else, though, is futile.

It's like learning to to use your fingers to pick something up for the first time as a kid: you just have to try enough times until it sticks.

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> vim is the closest any editor comes to interfacing directly with my brain.

It's funny you mention that. Just today, I had this moment where I realized that if someone asked me which key letters are used to move up/down/left/right, I'd have to pause and think about it.

I've been using Vim for years. Like, my index finger rests on the down key, so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up? Do I actually have to move my index finger to go left? What is my pinky doing most of the time?

It's just funny how all this stuff is burned into my brain but I wouldn't even be able to tell someone the basics without a keyboard in front of me.

j goes down because it looks like a down arrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#Legacy

> The use of the HJKL keys for moving the cursor in the vi editor and its descendants originated from the ADM-3A [...] The ←, ↓, ↑, → and Home labels printed on the H, J, K, L, and ~ ^ keys were a visual reference to the control characters Ctrl+H, Ctrl+J, Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ that were required to move the cursor left, down, up, right, and to the top/left corner (or "Home" position) of the terminal, respectively [...] The Ctrl+H and Ctrl+J functions were the standard ASCII backspace and line feed respectively, but the interpretations of Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ were new to the ADM-3A.

Seems almost a happy accident. I personally like the placement because the most common movement in a document is down and it's placed right under the most dextrous finger, the index finger, by a coincidence between ASCII encoding and the QWERTY layout. Up being the second most common movement was put under the second most dextrous finger. Nice.

It really is funny how much vi's odd-looking key choices aren't odd at all once you see the keyboard it was developed on:)

The value of being taught something by an expert.

I didn't know about the history, thanks for sharing!

(j = downarrow was a mnemonic I used while learning vim.)

Here is a direct link to the ADM-3A keyboard layout:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#/media/File:KB_Terminal...

Great, now I want a "here is" key

I just looked down at my keyboard... The letter 'j' has been rubbed off.

None of the keys on my keyboard have markings on them. :D

Just worn out from use, or do you have a Das keyboard, the kind with blank keycaps?

I knew a developer who had one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Keyboard

Das Keyboard, yep.

Let me guess: Dvorak

easy, the arrow keys.

> so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up?

Nope, j is down. J combines the current line with the next line, reducing whitespace between to 1 space.

Back when I first figured out what J was doing (having typo'd it regularly) I thought it was useless, then one day I just started reflexively using it when manipulating function arguments.

Likewise, k is up, K looks up the word under the cursor in a man page.

I think they were using uppercase to make the keys stand out, but they know they're not used with the shift key.

For their defence, keyboards are annotated with uppercase letters.

>Nope, j is down. J combines the current line with the next line, reducing whitespace between to 1 space.

And so J stands for Join (the next line to the current line), IIRC.

Pretty novice Vim user here. I FOR SURE think about it, and it costs me quite a bit of brain power to navigate. I made my own way pf remembering:

H = the leftmost key, so left L = the rightmost key, so right J = jeet (yeet), so down K = klimb (climb), so up

I look forward to the day this is just burned into my subconscious, but until then, this works I suppose

That's exactly the reason the keys were assigned that way. Pat yourself on the back, kid ;-)

exactly the reason starting with ^H is backspace (left) and ^J is linefeed (down)

Ha ha, good one.

Does the analogy hold for ^M which is carriage return?

Anyway, I remember that stuff. Had a lot of "fun" on Unixes back in the day using things like ^J, ^M, ^H, stty sane, stty -a, stty icrnl, stty onlcr (or is it the other way around), fiddling with termcap and terminfo, and much more ...

It's even weirder for me as I use the Colemak keyboard layout.

When I first switched to Colemak, around 2010, I remapped the movement keys so that they were in the same physical location as hjkl on qwerty.

Then I realised I'd lost compatibility with other readline based software. So I just learned to use the new, not particularly ergonomic, positions under Colemak.

At this point it's almost always from muscle memory now and couldn't tell you what I press half the time.

Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction and using it since the 90s has been like learning to play a musical instrument.

>Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction

Actually vim is more like the Great Glass Elevator cum Excavator, because it has buttons and levers (to extend your simile) for moving in every direction and performing operations of every kind, and most importantly, all sorts of combinations of the two:

>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018215

So, if tomorrow, either more movements or more operations were added to vim, they would automatically play well with the older ones.

This is orthogonality (1), and genius, IMO :)

(1) As they mean in microprocessor ISA design (, I think, not being a hardware guy, but have just read about it a little here and there, while doing assembly language programming years ago).

>Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction

vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, if the Great Glass Elevator was modal

Passwords are the same way for me. I can type my password on a keyboard, but if I have to enter it on my phone, I have no idea what it actually is. Thankfully, a password manager deals with most of my passwords but there is a few that I don't use it for.

A few weeks ago I was unsure of my PIN code because I got it wrong on the first try, the keypad somehow seemed different (I was getting cash, which I don't often do), and I just completely blanked. I got something from a store and paid by PIN there to make sure I got the right code, and then got my cash.

I've had the same PIN code for over 20 years.

Yeah, I think you'd have the same issue trying to teach people to play guitar over the lunch hour. It takes a lot of practice to learn vim but it's super rewarding once you do!

As a side note: "Lunch and learn" is work for me. I have a strikt rule, that whenever someone talks heavily about work at lunch, I consider it a meeting - just as "lunch and work". Therefore I will take a work break afterwards.

Lunch is !work for me.

Agreed completely. “Lunch and learns” and “brown bags”. I didn’t appreciate my old employer frequently co-opting my lunch breaks with more work.

I know exactly what you mean. At work people constantly ask me what keys do what and the moment they do my mind goes completely blank. To the point that I even forgot how to use vim for a short while until the conscious part of my brain is preoccupied with something else and suddenly I can use vim again.

I think all quick learning session of vim invariably turns into bootcamp style "learning to code". Jumps straight into what but not how and why.

To know what modal editing is and understand that first is going to help - but then your learning session is over like that without teaching any "tricks".

It's just different keyboard shortcuts than the other editors. That is pretty much it. You don't need to be so dramatic.

Also, in the GUI version of vim you have scrollbars, toolbar, and the standard keyboard shortcuts work, too. So you can use it like any other editor.

You can get vim simulators in most editors too. Even Emacs. The interesting question becomes whether you still prefer VIM as an editor. One advantage is you can use the same editor over SSH. If it is not there it is quick to install.

The issue with Vim for me is that it takes years for the keybinds to be picked up as muscle memory. Learning takes effort, people can’t learn everything. And there’s an endless amount of things I can learn other than Vim that will give me a more fulfilling life.

In my case, it only took a few months to be more effective with Vim than without it. Since I spend most of my time working, Vim is a great improvement to my quality of life. The benefits of Vim include not just productivity, but also comfort.

It helps to design the yourself in neovim?

I think it's more of a needed mental shift than years or effort that is the stumbling block.

You don't need to pick up a lot of keybinds in order to be fairly productive at text editing in vim.

The extra stuff will just make you more productive, maybe asymptomatically.

>asymptomatically

Heh, dang autocorrect or me, not sure.

I meant asymptotically.

OTOH watching someone else use vim when you already know the basics of vim is enlightening

I like to think of vim as bytecode for text manipulation. You train your brain to emit the bytecode via your fingers.

Ha ha. Vimcode, though.

And "vim" is pretty close to "vm" for virtual machine that runs that vimcode, or bytecode :)

You're a bad teacher. No shame in that.

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