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Comment by farslan | Hacker News Reader

In vim you can do that by putting these lines into ~/.vimrc:

  map <up> <nop>
  map <down> <nop>
  map <left> <nop>
  map <right> <nop>
  imap <up> <nop>
  imap <down> <nop>
  imap <left> <nop>
  imap <right> <nop>

This will disable the arrow keys in normal and insert mode.

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I'm not trying to be difficult here, just genuinely curious: why disable the arrow keys? Is it simply the speed boost you get from using hjkl on the home row vs moving your hand to the arrows?

I use Colemak, so hjkl is very counter-intuitive for me, whereas the arrow keys make sense and aren't /that/ far away.

EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684515 has some good explanations. So does anyone have suggestions for non-QWERTY users? remap the keys that are in the HJKL space, leading to a cascade of keys moved around? Deal with the counter-intuitiveness of actually using HJKL?

When I use Vim I barely even use hkjl except to fine-tune larger movement commands. I'll search for a symbol, or move word-by-word, or use f/F/t/T to move to a different character on a line, which gets me in the ballpark.

Even if hjkl is faster, I would be optimising for a case that just doesn't show up that much.

Dvorak users can get away with using hjkl with the dvorak layout - it's not that counter-intuitive. Your Colemak layout, however, looks beyond salvageable in terms of using Colemak hjkl. I think a re-binding is in order there.

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