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Comment by bgar | Hacker News Reader

Switching does have its benefits but I'm afraid it'll be a pain to deal with it switching the vim keys around.

I never felt pained on switching layouts. If this makes any sense: learning the muscle memory for Colemak almost seems to be on a lower "level" than vim (to me), so I kept hitting 'i' and 'a' and so on without even noticing.

Makes sense to me, I felt the exact same way.

I think that it's better to let the muscle memory of Colemak to develop and you will eventually get used to vim.

When I use vim I'm constantly thinking about words, like 'ci' (change in) 'ya' (yank around) etc.

So when you get your Colemak right vim is not a big hassle.

I do the same thing with Vim short cuts, think about their "meanings". I found it helped a lot!

I'm curious about h, j, k, and l. Same story?

When I switched to Dvorak, I adapted pretty quickly to vim. hjkl are effectively exploded across the keyboard, and I had to adjust to that, but adapting to the new locations for other commands was easier if I thought about the semantic meaning of the commands, and the keys themselves as abbreviations.

I just realized I tend to do the same thing, when I edit in vim I read the "phrases" I am typing, like ci" etc.

I don't find using the Colemak-shuffled hjkl comfortable, so I have `:set langmap=li,ko,hn,je,nh,ej,ik,ol,LI,KO,JE,EJ,IK,OL` in my .vimrc to make Vim usable for me on Colemak. Besides restoring the home row navigation, it moves the keys one key right into the qwerty jkl;, which is the neutral home row position. The problem with this is that langmap is a somewhat advanced option, and isn't supported by every Vim-like product, such as the Visual Studio Vim plugin.

Shai Coleman had a really extensive Vim remapping setup, but he has since stopped using Vim: http://colemak.com/pub/vim/colemak.vim

I was thinking about covering that topic. It's not that painful, I didn't have any problems on using Vim with colemak with only one alteration:

inoremap lh <Esc>

Before I used k-j, but the position of those in Colemak is 'e-n'... so it's totally unusable.

I mean if you're typing 'entropy' it leaves insert mode, and you get mad :)

Didn't take me more than a week to get used to 'e-n'.

I'm a dvorak user, and I've never had a problem with vim navigation. I just use the regular keys for it, and it seems to work out fine.

Same here in Colemak, I saw a lot of people taking the wrong approach and designing complicated .vimrcs. I think that's not great, specially if you have to do some pair programming with QWERTY users.

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