> vim is the closest any editor comes to interfacing directly with my brain.
It's funny you mention that. Just today, I had this moment where I realized that if someone asked me which key letters are used to move up/down/left/right, I'd have to pause and think about it.
I've been using Vim for years. Like, my index finger rests on the down key, so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up? Do I actually have to move my index finger to go left? What is my pinky doing most of the time?
It's just funny how all this stuff is burned into my brain but I wouldn't even be able to tell someone the basics without a keyboard in front of me.
It's even weirder for me as I use the Colemak keyboard layout.
When I first switched to Colemak, around 2010, I remapped the movement keys so that they were in the same physical location as hjkl on qwerty.
Then I realised I'd lost compatibility with other readline based software. So I just learned to use the new, not particularly ergonomic, positions under Colemak.
At this point it's almost always from muscle memory now and couldn't tell you what I press half the time.
Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction and using it since the 90s has been like learning to play a musical instrument.
>Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction
Actually vim is more like the Great Glass Elevator cum Excavator, because it has buttons and levers (to extend your simile) for moving in every direction and performing operations of every kind, and most importantly, all sorts of combinations of the two:
So, if tomorrow, either more movements or more operations were added to vim, they would automatically play well with the older ones.
This is orthogonality (1), and genius, IMO :)
(1) As they mean in microprocessor ISA design (, I think, not being a hardware guy, but have just read about it a little here and there, while doing assembly language programming years ago).
> so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up?
Nope, j is down. J combines the current line with the next line, reducing whitespace between to 1 space.
Back when I first figured out what J was doing (having typo'd it regularly) I thought it was useless, then one day I just started reflexively using it when manipulating function arguments.
Likewise, k is up, K looks up the word under the cursor in a man page.
Passwords are the same way for me. I can type my password on a keyboard, but if I have to enter it on my phone, I have no idea what it actually is. Thankfully, a password manager deals with most of my passwords but there is a few that I don't use it for.
A few weeks ago I was unsure of my PIN code because I got it wrong on the first try, the keypad somehow seemed different (I was getting cash, which I don't often do), and I just completely blanked. I got something from a store and paid by PIN there to make sure I got the right code, and then got my cash.
Does the analogy hold for ^M which is carriage return?
Anyway, I remember that stuff. Had a lot of "fun" on Unixes back in the day using things like ^J, ^M, ^H, stty sane, stty -a, stty icrnl, stty onlcr (or is it the other way around), fiddling with termcap and terminfo, and much more ...
> The use of the HJKL keys for moving the cursor in the vi editor and its descendants originated from the ADM-3A [...] The ←, ↓, ↑, → and Home labels printed on the H, J, K, L, and ~ ^ keys were a visual reference to the control characters Ctrl+H, Ctrl+J, Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ that were required to move the cursor left, down, up, right, and to the top/left corner (or "Home" position) of the terminal, respectively [...] The Ctrl+H and Ctrl+J functions were the standard ASCII backspace and line feed respectively, but the interpretations of Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ were new to the ADM-3A.
Seems almost a happy accident. I personally like the placement because the most common movement in a document is down and it's placed right under the most dextrous finger, the index finger, by a coincidence between ASCII encoding and the QWERTY layout. Up being the second most common movement was put under the second most dextrous finger. Nice.
It's funny you mention that. Just today, I had this moment where I realized that if someone asked me which key letters are used to move up/down/left/right, I'd have to pause and think about it.
I've been using Vim for years. Like, my index finger rests on the down key, so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up? Do I actually have to move my index finger to go left? What is my pinky doing most of the time?
It's just funny how all this stuff is burned into my brain but I wouldn't even be able to tell someone the basics without a keyboard in front of me.