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.
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.