Command: move down one line
What vi uses: j
What the emacs tutorial suggests: C-n
What I use in emacs: the down arrow
Then the strongest defenders of emacs tell you that you must use whatever you want because the purpose of emacs is that the editor must adapt to you and not the opposite.
Is constantly hitting the Escape key (even remapped to Caps Lock, or using ^[) really any better on your pinky?
Now, if I ssh between different unix box a lot without the time to pull my .vimrc from github, then I still have to resort to pinky-escape.
Personally, though, I don't find the worst strain comes from the placement of Ctrl. The worst comes from the awful staggered layout of keyboards that serves no purpose save for a long chain of HCI backwards compatibility with the typewriter. I hope someday keyboards like the TEK (which, incidentally, gives a perfect spot for Alt or Ctrl under the left thumb) become more commonplace, or eye movement-based systems supplant the use of one's hands for focus control.
For example, moving forward a character is C-f, moving forward a word is M-f, and moving a balanced expression forward is C-M-f. Same with b for backwards movement. C-a moves to the previous beginning-of-line, C-e to the next end-of-line. M-a and M-e do the same with statements in place of lines.
I can't even remember at this point how much of this is standard, but I've replicated the forward/backward movement for killing: C-d deletes a character forward, M-d kills a word, and C-M-d an expression. C-h deletes a character backward. Guess what M-h and C-M-h do.
Of course, both editors let you do basically whatever you want, so really the text input issue is just one of whether you prefer chording or modal input. And I'm not saying modal input isn't useful; Magit's input system is closer to vim's than to the rest of Emacs, as is Ediff's, and I like it that way, but I prefer chords for editing -- less state to hold in my head.
Sequential chords, though, like C-c C-v C-d, are right out, and using C-n and C-p and co. for up and down sucks, especially when I try to use M-p to select the last input in minibuffer history and hit M-o instead, prompting me to select Bold, Italic, or Other. I'll change them eventually; the hardest part is deciding what to replace them with.
/aimlessramble. I guess it all just boils down to "Use the tool you can best configure to work the way _you_ want it to." I think the linked article was trying to make the case that Emacs can be that tool for vim users.
In order of precedence: Standard vim movement -> EasyMotion -> Search.
I have my own code editor which is more like vi than emacs, but I'm using interactive search in it.
That's the best line I've heard to finish an emacs-vs-vi argument!
On the other hand, C-a and C-k (especially in combination with each other) and C-e are incredibly useful, and once I discovered them I immediately started using them everywhere.
Though I also tend to use M-f and M-b a lot to navigate by words instead of characters.
I also often navigate by incremental search.
I've heard a lot of people talk about keeping their fingers on the home row, and I more or less do that when I'm typing text like this, but for general navigation? I've sat next to a number of people who do it, and I get around my editor faster than they do. Based on this anecdotal evidence, I don't think moving my hand a short distance to reach another key is a significant speed cost.
(Each C-u is a power of 4. You can specify any number by typing it after the C-u, for example C-u 100 C-n to move down 100 lines.)
Sometimes I want to make a complicated motion in the horizontal and vertical axes at the same time in a context which is not well-formatted source code and hence has no good paragraph/word landing points. For this I move my hand slightly further and grab the mouse. It always amuses me watching people try to do it "the right way" and then spend 30 seconds trying to work out what sequence of buttons will get them there, then spend another 30 seconds remembering what they wanted to do when they got there.
I'm not trying to minimise the number of logical keystrokes, I'm trying to minimise the time and distraction of navigation. A few simple operations combined with key repeat seems to work really well. Lots of people seem to neglect the power offered by key repeat.
I'd love to meet somebody who could navigate source code faster than me and learn how they do it. When I do, I'll probably change my approach. However, I've worked with a lot of different people who used a lot of different approaches (yes, including that one where you display the line offset from point and type the number of every jump) and in the past decade I have not found any of them to be faster than me - although I have found a few who were roughly the same speed.
I'm sure something like this is possible in Emacs, but in vim I have it set up so that my current line shows the absolute line number and other lines show the relative line number.
If I'm eyeing a particular line that I want to jump to, I just read off its relative line number and hit j or k, according to whether it's down or up from where I'm at -- I'm there. Because I use relative line numbers, the number is never more than two digits.
For more precise navigation (jumping to a particular spot on a particular line), I use a plugin called EasyMotion, which basically lets me jump to any text object on the screen with a few key strokes.
I remap it to Caps Lock of course.
I keep escape as escape as well. Capslock is absolutely worthless to me.
These sort of systems are a great way to remap keys; I wish such remapping was exposed by operating systems in a nice stock way.
Why? Isn't that more inefficient because you have to move your hand off to the side. I can type 3 C-n before moving my to the right to do a single down arrow. Maybe I am just used to it by now, and forgot how hard it was when I started, but it makes complete sense to me.
Yes it's hard to get started, but once you get the hang of it navigation in emacs just becomes so painless.
Also it's hard or even impossible at first to do it on laptops but trust me you will be able to do it.
that's the old-school Starcraft way. try mapping caps-lock to control sometime, just to see, it's such wasted real-estate. nothing beats muscle memory and years of practice though.