How can you be so attached to taking your hand off the home row to move around? Or to that arrow shape?
This comment thread is kind of blowing my mind, how can so many people have an issue with this? It's such a tiny simple thing to put into muscle memory. Are you guys all hunt and peck typers?
I feel a little bad for being insulting, but it really is hard to imagine so much resistance to memorizing j=down, k=up.
The hjkl pattern is the same pattern as the arrows at the top of dance dance revolution and people seem to pick that up pretty quickly.
Touch-typist here: I don't hunt and peck and I can tell you that from a pure probabilistic standpoint if you're entering a typing contest with me you'll probably look like the one hunt and pecking ; )
It's not that it's hard to memorize: Emacs' 'p' for up and 'n' aren't hard to memorize. They're just utterly dumb. Just like 'jk'.
You're not sounding insulting: you're sounding like someone who has never put any thought into that issue arguing vs someone who did.
I'm an Emacs user and yet it's 'ijkl' for me (it's Emacs heresy of course).
Now I don't doubt that dance dance revolution players are representative of professional programmers... But lots of gamers (eg professional first-person shooter players) do use the inverted T arrow principle to quickly move up/down/right/left -- typically WASD and sometimes ESDF.
It simply makes more sense to "train your muscle memory" to something that also logically makes a lot of sense. You know, like... Up to go up. Down to go down. Left to go left. Right to go right.
This comment thread is kind of blowing my mind, how can so many people have an issue with this? It's such a tiny simple thing to put into muscle memory. Are you guys all hunt and peck typers?
I feel a little bad for being insulting, but it really is hard to imagine so much resistance to memorizing j=down, k=up.
The hjkl pattern is the same pattern as the arrows at the top of dance dance revolution and people seem to pick that up pretty quickly.