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Comment by harrytuttle | Hacker News Reader

Just to state some support for this: I have used vim for over a decade and I haven't used hjkl on a good day once. Arrow keys are fine.

Occasionally I use hjkl if the terminal is set up wrongly or it's a broken vi implementation but that's it.

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Interesting. I'm curious as to how and what you use vim for. I find it hard to believe that anyone would seriously do something like d + down arrow with dj available. All of those seconds (it takes me more than a second to go to the arrows then back to home row) add up over time.

You would use 'dd' instead which is faster since you don't have to have make sure your other hand is in the correct position.

My example involved deleting two lines, which you can accomplish with '2dd', 'dj', 'dddd', etc. When my hands are on my keyboard 'dj' is my personal preference. The parent poster was using arrow keys so naturally I'm wondering if for something like 'dj' he/she would use 'd + down arrow' since that seems like waste of time. It's a somewhat contrived example to see how far some users take the use of the arrow keys, which you quickly realize are not necessary in vim.

I have a ThinkPad. The keys are closer together.

Used for most editing tasks. Those seconds are fractional compared to thinking time before cutting code. I'm not paid in words per minute.

w, g, / are used more than the arrows anyway.

It depends on your keyboard as well. I use a Kinesis Advantage, which has the arrow keys in a place that doesn't require movement from your hands, so hjkl doesn't provide the advantage that it used to.

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