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Comment by ilikepi | Hacker News Reader

I find I'm having a mental conflict between Vim's hjkl controls and WASD-style gaming controls, despite having very little experience using the latter with my right hand. This is made worse since it happens to be 'i' that my right-hand middle finger hits when I think "go up".

Very neat though, regardless!

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This is what is preventing me from learning Vim. I play games every day using WASD movement and if I have to switch to hjkl my brain goes haywire.

I have been waiting for someone to create a Vim control scheme that relies on WASD movement and maybe also brings in other common gaming related keys (E for insert?, space for escape?) To me this seems more logical than hjkl/i/esc.

Until then though it just feels like more work that it needs to be for me to personally learn Vim. Which is a shame because I can recognize how useful it can be, especially after watching Destroy all Software screencasts.

I do both regularly. They are different hands and the different movements actually become very different feeling. When my right hand is on the mouse, WASD feels natural. Otherwise, I naturally hold my left hand near the ESC key and my right hand over HJKL.

Because it's the home row, it also feels more natural when you are getting ready to type. The mental separation between "gaming" and "typing" is not hard to get a hold of really quick. Give it a try! I guarantee you'll be completely used to it within a week.

Also, keep in mind all of these keys can be remapped in Vim anyways :)

It seems like that person I have been waiting for to create that mapping is me!

I had the same issue. Here's my config to solve it (ijkl become like arrow keys, h is insert instead):

    map k g<Down>
    map i g<Up>
    map j <Left>
    noremap h i

Note that with this config, we maintain the normal mode "inner" text objects with "h" instead of "i". So where you would previous type di' to delete inside quotes, now you'll dh'. And dh( instead of di(, etc. It all works, and I've been using this config for a couple years now.

I just tried the sname game and had the same experience (although I use ESDF for controls). My brain is not used to using my right hand for directional control.

That said it should be easy to remap vim keys to use WASD/etc - although there might be conflicts with other functions.

Having the same mental problem myself, even with a decade or more of both esdf and hjkl, and I'm now wondering if I should or could switch i and h -- switch input mode to h.

You can, please see my reply to your parent.

It's left hand vs right hand, though.

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