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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.

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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.

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