Comment by eska
5 days ago
Sorry to be blunt, but if you don’t want to spend effort on touch typing (and therefore avoid arrow keys), learning vim motions is rather pointless and you might as well not bother.
5 days ago
Sorry to be blunt, but if you don’t want to spend effort on touch typing (and therefore avoid arrow keys), learning vim motions is rather pointless and you might as well not bother.
I'll be blunt to you back: that's not true. Vim motions are useful because you don't have to switch between the keyboard and the mouse, even if you (like me) never bothered with touch typing.
but what if i learned to type Colemak?
Many years ago, I have switched to touch-typing using the Dvorak layout (on standard QWERTY keyboards), which I find much more comfortable.
Obviously any classic control key assignments, like those of vi or those of emacs, are far from optimal on a non-standard keyboard layout.
The only decent solution is to remap all control keys in your text editor, to whichever positions you prefer.
Any good text editor allows that. Likewise, all programs with a good user interface allow the remapping of the keyboard shortcuts.
I just have a layer on my keyboard that puts arrow keys where hjkl are on qwerty when I hold the tab key. Since tab is right next to my pinky finger on my laptop, it easily became muscle memory, and allows to use home row navigation in all apps, not just the ones that support hjkl.
At that point does your keyboard even still have arrow keys?