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Comment by gitaarik | Hacker News Reader

Today at a train station in the Netherlands (Utrecht) I noticed something special. I saw the letters hjkl on the sign in reverse order. These letters indentify the platform areas where you can enter the train. Depending on the length of the platform and the area where the train has entrances, it shows the letters.

https://postimg.cc/mcCWhMXw

Either this was super coincidence, or someone at the NS (the Dutch train company) is a vim fan and payed tribute to Bram like this.

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Although, thinking about it now, the letters do come after each other in the alpbabeth except that the I is missing between the H and J, but maybe they did that intentionally because it can be confused with the lower case L. So maybe just coincidence after all, but still it was special for me. I never saw this at the trains and now suddenly the week after Bram passed away this shows up.

Regardless it’s touching that it made you think of Bram

The partially alphabetic middle row of QWERTY is a remnant of an alphabetic layout that preceded it. QWERTY reduced typewriter jamming by moving common consecutive letters away from each other.

not a coincedence or tribute - same has been the same in the uk for many years. the letter "i" is typically not used for such purposes because it can so easily be confused with numeric "1" or alpha "l".

Pretty sure it's a tribute -- local trains in NL do not have named carriages FAFAIK, because there's no reserved seating. Only international trains have those indicators, and they do not go to Den Helder.

Definitely not a tribute. These are not carriage names, but stopping location indicators to show where the train will stop on the platform. Train station platforms have named areas.

Video in Dutch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPvh9SaQbUY

Although I use vim, I associate these letters more with the home row for touch typists.

Home row is jkl;

As a reminder, that's why most keyboards have physical indentations in f and j.

They're meant to be felt by index fingers.

Fun historical note: Mac keyboards until the late 90s or so had the bumps on the D and K for the middle finger. In a vacuum either's a reasonable choice but going back and forth was always fun.

I got my first split keyboard, and I kept getting lost. So I took a knife, and cut an indentation on the keys under my index fingers. Works great.

I didn't care about them on my old QWERTY because I wasn't touch typing correctly, now I understand why the indentations are there.

The home row is the whole row of keys. jkl; are the home keys of the home row that your fingers rest on.

These signs are location indicators to show where the train will stop at the platform!

Video in Dutch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPvh9SaQbUY

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