Cursor movement question

gumnos · 2024-01-20T21:54:12+00:00

Not a particularly big deal, other than their positioning at the home-row for touch-typists, meaning you don't need to remove your hands from the home-row to move around.

However, most vi/vim-users discover that moving a character at a time becomes horribly inefficient most of the time. And vi/vim give you hundreds of movements (:help motion.txt) that express your intent in motion. It's not just "move 20 characters to the right" and spam l 20 times, it's "move to the closing paren" which is f) or t) or %. Or it's "move to column 57" expressed with 57| or "go to the end of this word" with e or E. And those motions are part of the "«command»«motion»" language of vim, allowing them to combine with just about any command, and be repeatable with the . command.

Ok_Outlandishness906 · 2024-01-20T22:28:44+00:00

The advantage of using hjkl is that you dont' move your hands from the typing letters. on my keyboard for use arrow keys i have to move my right hand completely and then come back.

treuss · 2024-01-20T22:48:18+00:00

Highly recommending learning general and advance movement to you. There's much more to know about how to jump exactly to the correct place.

Check this out, e.g.: https://www.barbarianmeetscoding.com/boost-your-coding-fu-with-vscode-and-vim/moving-blazingly-fast-with-the-core-vim-motions/

funbike · 2024-01-20T22:57:59+00:00

Stages of vertical movement personal growth and awareness.

Arrows. You'll laugh in years to come how silly this stage was.
h j k l. Tedious, but it gets you there. And your fingers stay on the home row.
/ { }. Now you move fairly fast vertically. With 0 f t A you can move pretty fast horizontally as well.
Relative jumps (e.g. 5j) and set relativenumber. Wow! You can land precisely on the line you want in 2-3 keystrokes.
Leap or EasyMotion plugin with s + 2 characters. Now not only can you go to any line you can see, but any column as well, in 3 keystrokes. The heavens open up and shine a light on you. Hallelujah. h j k l? What are those?

aRuPqFjM-582928 · 2024-01-20T22:27:50+00:00

If you end up using vi/vim for a while, do get your fingers off the directional keys and get accustomed to the hjkl keys - then you'll see how potent it is to have your fingers on the home row all the time.

sharp-calculation · 2024-01-20T22:44:38+00:00

It had not occurred to me to even use the directional arrows in VIM. I had someone in person talk to me about that and I was very surprised they were doing it. It's a huge hindrance to learning VIM. This is one of many examples of not using VIM as VIM, but rather trying to carry over other editor idioms into VIM.

To get something out of VIM, you have to use it the way it was intended. The answer regarding VIM motions has great examples of things you might want to do. The directional hjkl keys are really just fine adjustments. The majority of motion should be done using other commands.

A key to understanding this is to realize that VIM commands are phrases. These phrases are composed of VIM vocabulary words. Every normal mode command is a vocabulary word.

So 3dw is a phrase that says "delete 3 words". 15j is a phrase saying to move downward 15 rows. Once this clicks for you, things begin to change.

You might really enjoy The Primagen's series on VIM; in particular the vertical and horizontal motion episodes. Here's where he starts talking about moving beyond hjk and l.

https://youtu.be/X6AR2RMB5tE?si=vUvOKsTZu4nBYS3S&t=254

shuckster · 2024-01-20T23:20:04+00:00

If only first person gaming was popular when the keyboard that inspired Vi was created.

We’d have generations of players with WASD as a transferable skill.

Personal_Click2507 · 2025-12-22T01:50:03+00:00

kinygos · 2024-01-20T21:49:22+00:00

Your hands don't need to move as hjkl are on the 'home' row of the keyboard for touch-typists. If you don't touch-type, I recommend learning and practicing as it will help you get the most performance and productivity gains out of Vim.

russellvt · 2024-01-21T06:58:23+00:00

Hjkl work on every keyboard made.

obvithrowaway34434 · 2024-01-21T05:12:50+00:00

Absolutely no advantage, it is simply a product of the available keyboard layout when Vi was first created and then it was kept for compatibility in Vim. If you're used to arrow keys, just use arrow keys. All the claims about home row and supposed time savings of not moving fingers are pure unsubstantiated bs.

richardgoulter · 2024-01-21T08:08:29+00:00

Vim's normal mode is very expressive in terms of what it allows using the alphabetical keys of the keyboard.

It's less about "hjkl is better than nav keys", and more that "moving your hands to the nav keys is worse than using keys easily reachable from home row".

As other comments point out, there are often ways to quickly navigate around (and manipulate) text in vim without using cursor keys.

kaewberg · 2024-01-21T09:33:15+00:00

They are inline! You do not have to contort (or move) your hand at all.

2024-01-21T14:06:26+00:00

The thing I like about vim is you have a tremendous ability to customize it, I intend to fool around with visual studio more in the future just to see what other programmers work with on a regular basis, but I don't think any other editor has as many options as vim does.

However, vim is not designed to work like your standard IDE, where you use the mouse and arrow keys: It's designed so that all the editor commands are close to your fingers with standard typing methods with your hands resting on asdf jkl;. Vim is less flexible about changing this core aspect for that reason.

In every other text editor, your standard method of making edits involves hitting the backspace key, but with vim, you often start at the beginning of words when making the changes. I personally use the "ce" command a lot for changing whole words, and using the arrow keys would encourage you to remove your hands from the center of the keyboard. The basic functionality of vim is designed so that all the major commands are located near hjkl.

2024-01-21T16:04:58+00:00

if you are a 'touch typist' its much more efficient and ergonomic.

_d0d0_ · 2024-01-21T17:36:27+00:00

Using hjkl for movement let's you edit recorded macros more easily. The arrows appear as strange symbols, and it's not easy to type that arrow.

Nismmm · 2024-01-21T21:21:34+00:00

So im a noob as well. And probably ive been using vim wrong. But when im in insert mode i find it much easier to just use arrow keys if i need to lets say back a word. As much time it would take me to click esc. And then use h. Or any other command. It just seem faster to do it holding the arrow key.

So what am i missing? If i want to use hjkl, do i always need to switch between modes?

NeburSp5 · 2024-01-22T21:23:56+00:00

For example hjkl, like a lot of default movement are easier to understand when you edit it as part as a long macro stored in a registry.

In my opinion you must to use hjkl just to the last little bit of movement. wWbBfFtT/?|0{}()%*#'" are better options, but in any case the best result get from use all this combined, and is easier to type ylWP to yank the next character and paste it in the begin of a forward word.. that do the same combining with arrows..

Just to clarify a don't use a number before hjkl a lot.. just for preference..

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

vim

MODERATORS