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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

vim and BSDs default configurations insisting on inexistance of arrow keys is a "tradition" not completely unlike clitoridectomy. Come on guys (and gals), we've been over this already.

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It is not insisting. Vim will happilly let you use the arrow keys. It's just that once you acclimate to "hjkl", it is slightly faster and more comfortable, since you don't need to move right hand anywhere while typing. Or at least that's how it works for me.

It is completely unlike that, please don't compare not having arrow keys to genital mutilation.

There's a thing called perspective that you may want to consider exploring. Remapping the arrow keys is a minor annoyance at worst.

What? The arrow keys work fine. They're just waaaaay over there. Why do you want to use them?

They're rather waaay on my keyboard where my right hand is.

What I'm talking about is deliberate crippled default configurations.

As I recall being forced to use the homerow in typing class was just like being circumcised.

Your terminal is probably not correctly configured. Remember that real terminals did not originally have arrow keys or home end keys or really anything that's not in ASCII. If you're actually using a termcap old enough that it doesn't know about those escape sequences (maybe Solaris and other commercial UNIX offerings), or you're using a more recent termcap but your $TERM is set to something ancient, then the escape sequences are not interpreted.

Of course UNIX terminal handling is not standardized at all, so you may find that some programs ignore $TERM and do their own thing.

$TERM is a joke when you're on ssh (and that's always). It's always "xterm" but there is a huge variation between those xterms and key codes seems to be altered as they pass down the chain.

Is Home ^]]1~ or it's ^]H? You have to guess every time.

You can use the arrows in vim by default, no problem with that. For example, all my current co-workers use vim and I'm the only one who navigates using HJKL. With that said, I really really recommend any vim user to at least give a shot at using it instead of arrow keys. YMMV, but for me, not having to reach for the arrows help me stay in the zone.

Some distros/OSes ship with unmapped arrow keys and broken home/end in the terminal. This is seriously bad for your health.

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