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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Learning to type is easily his best suggestion here. Not just type, but touch type including the symbols. If you ever wondered why vi is modal and uses normal keys for navigation rather than cursor keys you won't wonder any more after you learn to touch type.

It doesn't require that much practise either, a month of solid practise, 30 minutes a day will get you over the hump easily.

I would recommend getting a full size keyboard for this instead of the cramped, flat garbage of a laptop. Decent keyboards can be had at charity shops for a dollar.

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Vi uses normal keys rather than cursor keys because the keyboard it was developed on had arrows printed on those keys, and no cursor keys.

People continually want to attribute this to some rational design consideration, but it’s just post-hoc reasoning. If vin were authored 10 years later it would use arrow keys and there’s no reason to stick with this terrible UX.

I think it's more of a lucky accident. There really is something to be said for hjkl scrolling. I enable it in as many apps as I can because I find it genuinely more comfortable than arrow keys. And that's not because I'm some unreformed grognard, I was introduced to vim only a few years ago.

I just have trouble buying it. Competitive gamers earn their living navigating directionally using a keyboard. If placing the navigation keys in a line on the home row were really so much better they would all be doing it by now.

Competitive gamers aren't constantly switching between navigation mode and typing mode, and they use only a small fraction of all the keys on the keyboard.

Also, if their experience is supposed to be indicative, HJKL should be replaced by WASD which is apparently much more efficient.

Yeah I agree, wasd would be an improvement, or ijkl. hjkl is an anachronism and makes no sense.

Gamers use WASD for navigation because their right hand is on the mouse. Programmers try to minimize mouse usage. It's a different set of constraints.

But if the linear key layout is better, why isn't it asdf?

Uh.. gamers don’t use arrow keys..?

The point i am making is that they use an inverse t key configuration, not a flat line of keys which doesn't make sense

That’s more historical than anything. Especially because the S key is usually not used in WASD: instead of walking backwards, a combination of mouse+A/D is used. If you look around you’ll see some pros use ASD with S replacing W. In MMO PVP where more keys are necessary for abilities, SDF and ESDF are also a thing.

Do you really scroll using the keyboard? I always use the trackpack, which is just between my hands as I type, and I find it incredibly slow to use the keyboard for navigation unless it's just a few lines up/down... with the trackpad, without moving my hands more than a few centimeters, I can go anywhere in a file instantly.

Is the trackpad built into your keyboard?

No, I use the laptop all the time, even when on big screens. Tried using Apple's separate keyboard and trackpad, but I found it didn't work as well.

Its on the home row, starting position for your right hand. Farting about with the arrow keys or the mouse takes you right away from where you can start typing again. Its much faster if you learn to touchtype.

Keybr.com is great for this. I've been touch typing all my life, but when I started programming, I noticed that typing brackets, parens and a bunch of other symbols really slowed me down. Great to practice those as well.

Switching to Dvorak on a Qwerty layout is really effective. It’s way more punishing to look down at the wrong keys than to not look down. Not for the impatient though!

Cannot agree with this enough. All the dumb keyboard layout cargo culting aside, this is why I recommend people learn Dvorak. It has been hugely successful for everyone I’ve gotten to make the transition.

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