Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

YeGoblynQueenne

I find this completely pointless. You wean yourself off the mouse when you have to use the keyboard for most of the work you do. Trying to trick yourself to do "the right thing" (if that's what this is about) is just silly.

I use the keyboard almost exclusively, and even had colleagues remark on it rather impressed about it I guess (I don't mind the hacker cred, let's be honest here). I never had to force myself, or try silly tricks to drop a habit. I just found myself in situations where either there was no mouse, or it was more convenient to use the keyboard.

First I was forced to use runlevel 3 only, for three months (gpu died and I didn't have any money). Then I had a long commute with only a wimpy netbook with Fedora ...14, I think? With Xmonad on it (because it's damn light). Then I had a job that was done best over a network with powershell and windows remote. Then I had to do a lot of text processing and it was best done using Vim [1]. Then I spent a year on Z/Os where you can use a mouse but the point-and-shoot fields are much more convenient most of the time (except for copy/pasting, strangely). Then I noticed the Windows' 10 tiling desktop manager and there was much rejoicement (it's gotta be a deliberate Xmonad ripoff!). And now of course Windows has a bash shell so there's never any reason to leave the command line. Yay!

On the other hand, it's true that prolongued mouse use hurts my wrist and I am a bit worried that I might get RSI in the long run, so I'm conciously keeping my keyboard habbit fed. I guess what I'm saying is that the main thing you need is a good reason to drop the mouse, rather than a silly carrot-and-stick approach.

________________

[1] There I did force the issue a bit. I could have used Notepad++ but I was impressed with how a colleague was using vim and I wanted to use it too, so I resolved to make it my main text editor. Then again that's just more of the same: to learn vim I used vim in my everyday work.

Anecdotal counterexample: I wanted to learn to use Emacs' keyboard shortcuts for moving the point rather than the arrow keys or page-up / page-down. Leaving aside the question of how useful such a practice is, I only managed to reach my goal once I turned off the arrow keys in Emacs, so that I was forced to "the right thing".

I would argue that it wasn't so silly to do this for my personal use, I'm quite happy with the result.

Similarly, I've found that getting people to learn how to use vim's movement keys is much easier once I persuade them to add

    inoremap <Left>  <NOP>
    inoremap <Right> <NOP>
    inoremap <Up>    <NOP>
    inoremap <Down>  <NOP>

to their .vimrc

[Edited heavily from initial comment]

That's not just pointless, that's actively harmful. The only thing you achieve in this way is to make it harder for people to see any benefit in learning to use vim, and I question your motivation in doing so.

Vim is useful because it lets you achieve a lot with minimal effort. That it takes some time to learn to use it well is an inevitable side effect of the breadth of control it gives you, and not something to be celebrated in its own right.

There is no One True Way. If you can put that in a shortcut, I strongly urge you to do it, and use it ten times a day until it really sinks in.

[This is a reply to the 'edited heavily' version, I didn't see the original]

> I question your motivation in doing so.

The users in question wanted to get into the habit of using hjkl because you can do things like 23j more easily with them. My motivation was to help them do so.

My suggestion helped them achieve that, and once it had, they removed the config lines again. And thanked me for the help.

> There is no One True Way. If you can put that in a shortcut, I strongly urge you to do it, and use it ten times a day until it really sinks in.

I agree that there's no One True Way. Which is why your a-priori assumption that this couldn't possibly help people when I already know it can seems strange to me; I'm sure it wouldn't help everybody, but the specific people I picked got on fine with it.

Fair point- if it worked for them, it worked for them. I just thought it sounded a bit sadistic, that's all.

For some people it would definitely be sadism. I don't try and convince people I believe that would be true for to try it.

OTOH, watching a partner of mine play with movement commands after they'd internalised hjkl and spending the next half hour navigating around a document while giggling and grinning at me ... definitely demostrates that isn't universal.

I am, honestly, struggling to be polite after you called me making somebody I was in love with happy actively harmful and called my motivations into question rather than considering that there might me more than one way to learn it, but OTOH you're clearly acting in good faith so I hold no animus towards you for your mistake.

I am not struggling at all to be polite. There's rarely good reason to be impolite.

I meant actively harmful towards vim's reputation as a useful editor, not to the person you're in love with, whom of course I have not been acquainted with.

Your original comment gave me little context to judge your motivation other than "I told some people to disable their arrow keys". Which I find unnecessary, so I questioned your motivation: literally, I could not understand why you did that.

> I just found myself in situations where either there was no mouse, or it was more convenient to use the keyboard.

So it's better to just unplug the mouse then? :)

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