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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

No kidding. I spend a ton of my day in Vim and use the arrow keys because I like them. That's the only reason: I've tried hjkl (I mean, I've ascended seven times in Nethack, I know hjkl) and I don't like it. I even use motions...with the arrow keys. I have a Mac and the arrow keys are all of three and a half inches from the home row and I do not have the little blob in the back of my brain that lights up with pain when I am performing a trivial operation in a more mentally consistent but less optimal manner. (The time it's taken to write this post has probably outstripped any optimization I'd get for using hjkl...yearly.)

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I don't do use hjkl out of concerns about optimality, personally. I do it because I find moving my hand back and forth from the home row to the arrow keys is hard on my wrists, and I get tired sooner. I've found that coding is a lot less hard on my hands since I started using the traditional vim way of doing things, but YMMV of course.

I'm sure that's true for some folks, yeah. For me, I find it to be less of a concern since moving to a laptop keyboard (less distance to move, forced me to stop pounding the keyboard) and working at a standing desk a lot more. Those seemed to address the deeper causes of my ergonomics issues.

But as Drew points out in his post, moving by by word (w,b and e) and by character search (f,F,t,T) is much faster the arrow keys or h,j,k,l.

The article isn't about not using h,j,k,l completely but encouraging people to use those other keys for movement.

Sure. And don't get me wrong--I use them! (Though I will admit that also use that touchy-pointy thing that's bolted on below my spacebar for getting around too, which I never did on Windows or Linux.) But when I need to move character-by-character, for me, it makes way more logical sense to use the things with the left, right, up, and down marks on them because that's what they're there for. hjkl doesn't make sense to me, so I don't use it.

(Something like HJUK--or even just WASD--would make more sense to me, but I don't care enough to start remapping all the live-long day.)

I think you end up wasting time deciding what combinations of w, b, e, f, F, t, T, h, j, k, and l you need to type to get you to the right place. Then you feel really good and efficient because you hit "just a few keys" and got where you wanted. Meanwhile, I took 2 seconds to grab the mouse, click where I want to be, and return my hands to the home row.

That's not to say Vim's keyboard capabilities aren't useful--they are! Sometimes you just want to move a character over, sometimes you need to justify a paragraph (gqap, or |fmt). But I'll contend that in general, when you want to move to a point in the text, using the mouse pointer to point where you want is the easiest.

When I need a shopkeeper to grab something off the shelf (maybe my favorite dirty magazine, I don't know), I don't say "ok 3 rows down from the top, 7 columns in, no sorry one more column to the right, that's it". I point and say, "I want that one".

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