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Comment by Qwertious | Hacker News Reader

Vim is an amazingly good concept, but the actual implementations completely lack a decent user experience. Like, when you do clearly-suboptimal key combinations (like going past a 4-line paragraph by hitting j 4 times instead of just pressing } once),there should be some side-window suggesting better practices. To be fair, Kakoune does that, but there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit like that.

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This particular example makes assumptions: that hitting j four times is worse than entering } once.

This depends on typist and keyboard; I use Swedish/Finnish keyboard and touch-type, and hitting j four times happens without looking or thinking. Hitting } requires me to lift my right hand from typing position, hold Alt-Gr, press 0, and then go back to typing position.

Every major programming language uses english keyboard. I'm a starter amateur coder but first thing I did was learn the en-us keyboard layout. There are options to use Alt-Gr accented letters for spanish which I use but also for combining letters which should work for finnish/swedish.

Programming languages don't use keyboards; they use some sets of characters, typically a subset of ASCII. Keyboards then can produce those characters.

And yes, typing [\]{|} and so on is inconvenient on my keyboard. I particularly detest the choice of \ over / in MSDOS and Windows path names.

I occasionally use US keyboard layout just to get around these difficulties, but whenever I arrive at some random computer, it will have the local layout.

(This is particularly confusing when going to France or Germany with they AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.)

4j takes half the keystrokes of jjjj, no matter which keyboard layout you're using :)

Yes, but j is where my right index finger sits in the basic typing position, so hitting j four times is still better...

Does Vim not have alternate mappings for other keyboard layouts?

There's at least one remapping to make it dvorak friendly.

I've used vim for years with Dvorak and no remapping. Works great, IMO.

Oh, I'm using it that way, too. (Just don't tell anyone I'm not using hjkl for navigating; my Kinesis Advantage keyboard has cursor keys in sensible locations.)

But there's at least one attempt at a nice remapping for dvorak.

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