Comment by AdieuToLogic

The way I like to explain vim to people new to it is; start from "the inside out" on a QWERTY keyboard and assume most people are right-handed.

By that, I mean the hjkl navigation keys are the first kind of navigation people want to do and are conveniently easily typed with the right hand in a traditional "home-row" position.

Next, very common editing commands are associated with home-row keys associated with the left hand; asd, with finding a character on the current line associated with f (and F for finding backward).

After those, other lesser used, but still very useful, commands are associated with the rows above and below the "home-row".

Finally, repeating any of these is bound to prefixed numbers, which are of course two rows above the "home-row" on a QWERTY keyboard.

Modifiers such as Shift, Ctrl, and others are approximately the same distance as the numeric row, unless one binds CapsLock to be Ctrl on most modern keyboards (note that Sun's keyboard got it right and had Ctrl in the position most keyboards now have CapsLock).

Interestingly enough, learning vim can often times follow the above distances from hjkl with great result.