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by cuddlybacon 2212 days ago
> I wonder if the defaults of vi are somehow optimized for QWERTY.

Only hjkl for movement. Everything else is fine.

I still wouldn't make the switch again. You'd get more millage from spending the ~2 weeks doing a bunch of speed typing practice with qwerty.

1 comments

The problem is that most of the typing in vim is based on muscle memory ... thinking about it I have no idea what the keys I use for commenting out code.

I tried to learn Dvorak and later Neo ... Not being able to use Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V like I was used to was annoying ... not being able to use vim anymore was the reason I stayed with QWERTY (QWERTZ in German).

That Ctrl key muscle memory is why Colemak made the explicit decision to leave all of ZXCVB in the same place as QWERTY.

A lot of Vim is mnemonic and while relearning the muscle memory is tough, relearning the mnemonics can be useful to reinforce what you know about Vim.

(Just maybe don't make the mistake I made at one point of trying a "remap the world" configuration, learning entirely new mnemonics for classic operations, and then realizing maybe too late I'd prefer a smaller remapped config. Unlearning the wrong mnemonics is hard.)