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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

Do you understand the appeal of touch typing over hunting and pecking?

Touch typing is hard at first. You have to force yourself to learn it. But once you do, you don't have to think about typing anymore. Isn't learning to touch type liberating to your productivity and thought process?

Learning Vim is the same thing.

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Touch typing is a great skill to have of course, as is using keyboard shortcuts. But I can get by with standardised shortcuts, and I'd prefer not learning a new set of shortcuts used by a single program, especially when that program has a modal interface. Maybe modal keyboard interfaces are used by more than vi, but I don't know of any other programs that have one.

Once I fell in love with modal editing, I started using it everywhere I could. vi(m) bindings in my shell, web browser, etc. I wish it were seamless everywhere but it's certainly more ubiquitous than just one program. Couple that with a working knowledge of emacs navigation keys which work throughout OSX and thing become a lot nicer.

So what other programs do you use that have a balance parens command? or shift text left or right? Beyond the basic movements, all your "interesting" shortcuts are specific to your text editor anyway.

Unless you're using emacs on a Mac, in which case you have emacs keybindings in all the standard text fields anyway.

Or if you're using MacVim, which supports the standard mac cursor movements (command-arrow to end of line, option-arrow to move by word, option-delete to delete word, etc)

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