this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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Direction navigation in vim is hjkl.
I know I'm just a vim-less heathen, but using letters for navigation in a text editor seems kind stupid when arrows exist.
moving my hand this much SUCKS
No, you're 100% right. The only reason it's this way is this: https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor
These literally were the arrow keys on the machine that vim was originally developed on.
Why the hell didn't they go with JIKL or something instead then, so the pattern at least resembles the direction it navigates?
Wasd was revolutionary at the time
This really just shows how fundamentally terrible product developers engineers are.
so your finges dont have to leave the home row. Its acually peak when you used hjkl for some time
You should boycott vim. That'll teach 'em.
The reason it's so popular is because it provides directional navigation on the home row, with the direction that's by far the most common (down) under your strongest, dominant finger (the index finger).
It's much better for both efficiency and ergonomics than arrow keys.
Why would you move your hand to arrow keys when the letter are already under your fingers?
ESC, use-letter-to-navigate, i, type, ESC, navigate, i, type
Really simple. On my keyboard I re-mapped ESC to TAB so I don't even have to move my hand to switch between navigate and insert modes.
So you've transferred the required hand move from the right hand to the left, and added extra required keystrokes to accomplish the same task. I don't see how that isn't worse.
I use layers so esc is actually almost directly under my pinky.
Moving hands is an extremely time-consuming task when you're typing 60+ words per minute. Couple of keystrokes are much much faster than relocating your hand twice.
No, it's a key stroke, not hand move. I don't have to reposition my hand to hit ESC. You do have to reposition your hand to use arrow keys.
Also, you usually move the cursor by more than just one character. It's one extra keystroke to reposition the cursor, not to move it by one char. You have shortcuts to jump to end of file, specific line, end of line or even create and jump to bookmarks. All this with just standard keys, without repositioning your hands to use the mouse or arrow keys.
Your keyboard must be slightly different than the one I have in front of me right now. Home row to esc and home row to arrows is the same distance on mine.
First, as I said, I remapped ESC to TAB key. Tab is very close.
Second, it's different to hit ESC ones than to use arrows keys to move around. To go back to home row after using arrow keys I have to feel around the keys trying to find "j" again. Or look at keyboard. I don't have to do that after hitting ESC once.
I'm not bothering to talk about non default layouts. Remapping is a separate discussion, since I could just as easily say it's better to remap wasd to the arrow function and have the FN key toggle it, since a much higher number of people already have that navigation method trained into muscle memory. This is a preference game no matter what, but it becomes an especially pointless discussion if you base it on custom layouts.
Custom layout was only part of my answer. Most vim users don't use custom layouts and second point still holds.
Great idea. I would give you like 5% of what vim offers but 5% is better than 0%.
All vim users have hjkl trained into muscle memory. No one is saying that it's automatically better. vim has a learning curve. When you know how to use it it's simply better than traditional editors.
I have it instead of CapsLock, tab is too useful to forego.
But yes, arrow keys are too far, and I avoid them everytime I can, including in Shell
Yeah, sorry. I have:
Esc -> Caps lock (useless so far away)
Caps Lock -> Tab (the most useful so closest)
Tab -> Esc -> second most useful
I had it for so long that I forgot which one is which :)
Imma throw another option into the ring which is Caps lock -> Esc / Ctrl. it‘s esc when tapped and ctrl when combined/ held for longer. veeeery useful
Sounds interesting. How do you set this up in Linux? I'm just remapping keys on X level now.
I‘m sure there’s a good way to do this on the OS side, but I‘m doing it in ZMK/ QMK.