Whoever downvoted this guy was wrong. hjkl are useless. I gained vim proficiency through a few years of using it. Funny thing is that I never, ever used these keys for navigation: at the beginning I mapped arrows to them and later I just stopped using them altogether, outside of a few rare cases like block selection.
Wait. You don't use hjkl and you also don't use the arrow keys anymore. So how would you, say, move left one character?
Most experienced vim users consider movement using the hjkl keys to be essential to the efficient use of vim. Some even go so far as to recommend unmapping the arrow keys altogether.
As someone who's used vim for about 20 years, I have to agree with them. If you don't use the hjkl keys for movement, you're almost certainly making your editing experience less efficient and more painful than it would be if you just buckled down and learned them.
There's a very good reason for keeping the most-used movement keys on the home row: you don't have to move your fingers off the home row to use them. Arrow keys and virtually all other motion keys are less efficient for this reason.
The more you have to move your hands and fingers, the less efficient your movement will be. Moving your hand back and forth to the arrow keys might not seem so much, but over time it adds up.
The truth is that becoming comfortable with the hjkl keys is no more difficult or unpleasant than playing nethack for a little while. You'll find yourself becoming an hjkl master in no time.
It sounds like you completely missed the parent's and my point.
hjkl are only marginally better than the arrows: kkkk is just as silly as <up><up><up><up> and their only benefit is in not moving the right hand to the arrow keys at the beginning and end of the sequence. Other than that hitting k 4 times to move the cursor 4 lines above doesn't offer much that the arrows don't.
4k is obviously better but yeah, it also works with the arrows so even there, the benefit is not that great.
what is better than both the arrows and hjkl, though, is all the other motions provided by Vim: wWbBeE/?{}fFtT and so on.
hjkl are really the tree that hides the forest and focusing one's effort on learning them is almost pointless.
The other movement commands you mention aren't "better" than the hjkl keys. They are very useful, but accomplish different things.
For example, the h key moves one character left. Those other movement keys aren't going to do that for you except in special circumstances.
That said, no one is suggesting that in vim the only movement keys one should use are hjkl. Those other movement keys you mention are also very important, and you definitely should learn them after mastering hjkl.
As for the arrow keys, the sooner you break free of that crutch, the better. You will find your editing efficiency improves immensely when you are able to keep your fingers mostly on the home row.
It's like the difference between touch typing vs hunt and peck typing. Some people are actually quite fast hunt and peck typers. But a touch typist will feel nothing but pity for all the energy they waste hunting and pecking when they could be comfortably and leisurely typing by touch.
There are some limited uses cases for the arrow keys in vim, however; such as occasional one-handed browsing with the arrow keys and page-up/page-down keys, which are conveniently close together on many US keyboards. (Don't mistake this use case for movement while editing, which is very different from simply browsing through a document.)
I've also known of people who use their arrow keys for accomplishing tasks such as resizing windows, which is a reasonable use case because it's generally done infrequently enough for the extra hand motion not to matter.
Fuck, I just lost 20 fucking minutes of typing. What's with that stupid "link expired" bullshit?
Whatever, I had a nice demonstration where the same simple task used 39 keypresses with only k + h, 9 keypresses with k + b and only 5-6 keypresses with a backward search. After that, the last paragraph went something like this:
"hjkl have their place in our arsenal, obviously, but focusing on them like if they were the apex of productivity and the single key to mastering Vim is both misleading and absurd."
---
Also, the only reason why Vim uses hjkl for movement is because the terminal on which Bill Joy created Vi didn't have physical arrows. The whole homerow/efficiency business is just post facto rationalizing.
Next time, at least in Chrome, you can hit the back button to return to the page you were at with your text in tact.
But, you probably wasted your time anyway because no one is disputing with you that you that there are quicker ways to navigate in Vim than exclusive use of hjkl. The argument is that there is a place for them in navigation, and that using them over the arrow keys keeps your hands on the home row allowing a smoother transition between navigation and input.
Now, you may disagree that there's any loss by using the arrow keys in your workflow. And you may be right. But that certainly does not make the claim "hjkl are useless" universally accurate--which is what started this thread down this argument.
I said "useless", but only because johncoltrane said "worthless" earlier :) But I understand it as "learn to be effective with other movement commands, don't concentrate on hjkl" - and that was my message too.
Anyway, I don't know whether arrows are faster or not. For me they most probably wouldn't, for some people they could be. However, for me right now, when I know and use other commands much more than arrows/hjkl, learning the former would be simply a case of diminishing returns.
I think that proficient use of vi-style keybinding means that movements by one letter are the rarest ones. I don't know, but I feel that I don't use them more that a few times per hour at most. I have macros, scripts and !programs to use, not to mention other movements. And besides, look - Emacs doesn't have hjkl, has wWetc. and is not slower than VIM! (except with startup).
Also I think that insisting on hjkl efficiency even without any proof is not the best thing to do to attract more users to VIM ;)
That's certainly fair. I wasn't trying to come off as a hjkl evangelist, I just thought that the terms 'worthless' and 'useless' were way too strong to support.
I guess I misunderstood the point you guys were making, because I certainly agree that someone learning Vim should learn to be effective with other movement commands, and not concentrate on hjkl. The value of Vim is not just being able to move around text with a standard one character up/down/left/right movement, hands on home row or not.
My original comment was only about hjkl vs motions: I didn't bring arrows in the discussion, the parent did. Also my claim was:
> hjkl are almost worthless compared to other means of navigation
and I stand by it. I didn't write "hjkl are useless" or advocate the use of arrows vs hjkl, IIRC.
hjkl are better than the arrows for short range movements but those short range movements (1-3 cols, 1-3 lines) make up such a small part of the movements we actually do all day long that focusing on hjkl is just absurd.
All the hjkl advocacy can be reduced to "Do whatever you'd do with arrows but with hjkl because it helps you save all those right hand movements… and home row." But char-by-car and line-by-line movement is just as slow and bad with hjkl as it is with arrows.
Saving a few slight translations of the right hand is so worthless compared to the thousands of hjkl or arrows you save with bBwWeEfFtT/?{}() and friends… unless we try to save our wrists but why make productivity claims, then?
I apologize, I did confuse you with the other commentator.
Everyone agrees that using w to move a word at a time is better than llllllll. No one is arguing with you about that. So in that sense, we all agree that for certain movements, hjkl really is worthless compared to alternatives.
But if you want to move a few characters, there's no better option than hljk.
Second best are the arrow keys. But there's really no reason to move your hand out of position just to move one character when your finger is already on the key which will do it.
So, I don't think it's at all accurate to say in general that hjkl is worthless compared to other means of navigation. They have their place, and they're quite valuable there since all other means of navigation are almost worthless compared to hjkl when moving a few characters.
Yes, moving by a few characters is indeed best done with hjkl if you touch type.
But the vast majority of movements we do doesn't belong to that category. In a day, I'll do a hundred or a thousand more long range movements and I argue that these long range movements are those that deserve optimization the most. Going back a few words is better done with bbb and (probably) a couple of l than 20 or so h and IMO insisting on new users to disable the arrow keys to learn hjkl is way beside the mark and horribly myopic.
Using hjkl instead of the arrows is better but the gain is ridiculous compared to what you get with motions: if you replace a thousand of arrows with a thousand of hjkl you get a small benefit; if you replace a thousand of hjkl or arrows with a hundred of bw and co. you get a huge benefit. Learning hjkl gets so much emphasis for so little usefulness…
So yeah, hjkl are almost worthless compared to other means of navigation. For a huge percentage of the actual movements we do all day long.
"It's like the difference between touch typing vs hunt and peck typing. Some people are actually quite fast hunt and peck typers. But a touch typist will feel nothing but pity for all the energy they waste hunting and pecking when they could be comfortably and leisurely typing by touch."
You realize that you just offended me? I "hunt and peck" 80 wpm and am quite comfortable with it, thank you. It's enough for me.
Also I'd like to see some proof for oh that faster hjkl versus arrows, especially on non-standard keyboard where the distance is much closer.
"Wait. You don't use hjkl and you also don't use the arrow keys anymore. So how would you, say, move left one character?"
Easy:
:call cursor('.', col('.')+1)
"There's a very good reason for keeping the most-used movement keys on the home row"
I can't touch type, I'm sorry, I know little kittens will die because of me.
"You'll find yourself becoming an hjkl master in no time."
I don't want to.
It's that simple - one has to decide when he should stop searching for efficiency and should start focusing on other thing. For me this moment came when I saw how efficient and pleasant I can be with 4w or 2(ciw. Also, for me - without touch typing - hjkl is meaningless. I'm that much slower than you that moving my hand to arrows doesn't slow me down at all.
Even if I could touch type, I still wouldn't be convinced. I think that M,L,H together with word, sentence and paragraph movements is much more of a gain than hjkl anyway. And I just DON'T move my cursor by one character, because I find ciw, ca" and friends much more convenient.
If you want to beat yourself out of using them (or /gasp/, arrow keys) instead of more appropriate commands, (and can afford the productivity hit and fits of rage when starting off), try using medium-mode[1] (or, if you're really silly, hard-mode[2])
Vimtutor teaches you most of what you learned but for free, within Vim itself and in the context of actual text editing.
If you want to learn Vim, use it.