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Comment by techiferous | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of dvorak, I use dvorak and that's one reason I haven't entertained the idea of switching to vim. If I understand correctly, vim assumes qwerty.

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This is a common misconception. There are SOME niceties in VIM that make more sense in qwerty (i.e hjkl for up, down, left, right respectively) but most shortcuts are NOT keyboard layout dependent. VIM's shortcuts are mostly mneumonics. For example, if you wanted to "delete a word", you would enter dw. In my head I think dw, not home-row+middle+left-hand, ring-finger+left-hand+top-row. Don't let this qwerty/dvorak be an excuse. Just do it. ;)

I've used Dvorak for years, and have no problem whatsoever using vi and Emacs with it. (I use Emacs for major work and nvi for quick edits in the shell.) Emacs is significantly better with Dvorak, IMHO, because there isn't so much mashed together on the left hand.

The only thing I've ever had a hard time getting used to with Dvorak is the diagonal movement commands in nethack. hjkl is not a big deal, but yubn trips me up.

have you tried mg instead of nvi for all those quick shell edits? the commands are still the same.

Yes. By and large, it only preserves the aspects of Emacs I don't care for. (It is in OpenBSD's default install, though. That's cool.)

I like Emacs's extension model, and its "everything is a buffer" design, but dislike its modifier-heavy keybindings. I like vi's modal interface and general command orthogonality, but would rather have a persistent, extensible, etc. environment. (Also, I like Lisp, but elisp kind of sucks. And I have written, and continue to write, a fair amount of elisp.)

On the balance, Emacs works better for me, though if a synthesis of the two with a good extension language (I nominate Lua) ever comes along, and retroactively gets the ten programmer-centuries of work it'd take to match what Emacs has, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Also: Yes, I know about Viper and the other vi-emulation modes, but people who write Emacs extensions follow the cultural standards for keybindings, etc. Including me.

I switched to both Vim and Dvorak cold turkey at the beginning of this year. (I figured as long as I can't type, might as well be unable to edit things too.) I am not sure if not having prior knowledge of QWERTY Vim makes any difference, but I have seen no downside to using Dvorak. The most common complaint I see--the hjkl thing--isn't even an clear-cut disadvantage. Now they are on two different hands and I think it makes movement faster. Vim commands are all mnemonic, so unless you Vim has penetrated so deep into the subcortex that it's all muscle memory, learning shouldn't be much of a problem.

Definitely gratifying to hear this guy's experience, BTW. I got religion when it comes to Vim. If you spend 8-10 hours a day editing text, it makes sense to put some thought into how you are doing it. Small efficiency gains add up.

vi commands $, %. and ^ are conveniently placed on QWERTY; Shift-4/5/6. If you use the one true style of braces for your C code then you can move through if-else-if chains quickly. $ moves to the end of the line, placing you on the open brace, % moves to the matching close brace at the start of the next

    } else if (...) {

line, repeat... To go the other direction, ^ moves you to the first non-white character, the close brace.

The top row in US Dvorak is exactly the same as on QWERTY -- $, % and ^ don't change places.

You can easily download alternate keymaps that adapt it to dvorak. Vim assumes qwerty, and thus things like the movement keys are remapped; but it doesn't really matter where the majority of the keys are. Most of vim's key layout is semantic rather than positional.

It sure doesn't help the learning curve though, as you basically can't talk about which keys to use with most (qwerty) users.

incorrect. insert mode is still 'i'. and search is still '/'. They are at different places on the keyboard but nothing changes except for the one single thing: hjkl that could be used to move the cursor are not as neatly together now. You can talk to a qwerty vim user w/o any problem. just don't tell him to press the "third key from the left" or smth ;).

I use dvorak and Vim. You can remap the keys easily enough, here's my vimrc for example:

http://github.com/andrewvc/vim-settings/blob/master/vimrc

I only remapped some of the keys though. Remapping ':' is really useful, I have it mapped to - (which is , in qwerty), which means its only a step away from my right pinky, no shift required.

other than me using 'ce' instead of 'cw', it isn't any different. this stuff is very muscle memory-ish. the location of the keys is not really a factor except for finger collisions such as 'cw'... which is the only such collision i remember noticing

hjkl is kind of a red herring in this case. those keys happen to be bunched together in qwerty, but that's an irrelevant accident of history, and those keys are not used very commonly to begin with. at least, they shouldn't be used very commonly. much better and faster keys are: 'w', 'b', 'I', 'A', '{', '}', 't', '/' etc.

HJKL's location on a QWERTY keyboard directly influenced them being chosen. They were to hand under the right hand, and mnemonically, ^H is BS, ^J is LF, ^K is VT (vertical tab) which at least keys the vertical connection going, and L is just at the opposite end to H. :-)

    " Dvorak
    " Normally, < ^ v > == h k j l
    " Here,     < ^ v > == h t n s, d remains delete 
    noremap t k
    noremap k t

    noremap n j
    noremap j n

    noremap s l
    noremap l s

(And for those accustomed to vim, there is no error in the layout.)

At first glance, I thought that was a Haskell program.

I switched away from vim when I switched from qwerty to dvorak because I didn't want to relearn all the commands.

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