Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdata | Hacker News Reader

When I first broke into web development, my editors of choice were Coda, Dreamweaver and Visual Studio (I wonder if I am dating myself here). I made a mid-career move to (non-gui) Vim, mostly out of general interest. The ramp up to Vim coming from GUI-heavy editors was a long one, but I stuck with it and it was worth it for me.

So, it's definitely possible to switch, you just have to be able to deal with that ramp up.

View on HN

I've been trying out vim for a while, hoping to get more productive, but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys- and that I have to reach all the way across the keyboard to hit [esc] every three seconds is not helping...

I pretty much use sublime text for everything these days.

You can map Caps Lock to esc. A lot of people who use Vim do that.

You can also remap Esc to jj by adding the following to your vimrc

inoremap jj <Esc>

The hjkl thing feels weird for a long time but it becomes natural after a while. I used Sublime for a long time with the Vintage plugin (vim like movements and some other vim features) before moving to Vim and that made the transition much easier for me. I still like Sublime, but Vim's full integration with the terminal environment is hard to beat.

> but the fact that "hjkl" is not "jkl;" -home keys-

On American keyboards, anyway. That isn't how the keys are laid out on modern Dutch keyboards, though I don't know what they were like when Vim was created.

Vim inherited the keyboard mapping from vi. vi was designed on a QWERTY (American) keyboard, but the particular terminal that the author used had arrows printed on the hjkl keycaps.

More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

Out of the box, ctrl-[ is mapped to escape. It took me about a week to un-learn Esc, but it is one of the better vim decisions I've made (along with mapping j to gj and k to gk, and mapping tab to :bnext).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com