[erifneerg]

But as Drew points out in his post, moving by by word (w,b and e) and by character search (f,F,t,T) is much faster the arrow keys or h,j,k,l.

The article isn't about not using h,j,k,l completely but encouraging people to use those other keys for movement.

[jff]

I think you end up wasting time deciding what combinations of w, b, e, f, F, t, T, h, j, k, and l you need to type to get you to the right place. Then you feel really good and efficient because you hit "just a few keys" and got where you wanted. Meanwhile, I took 2 seconds to grab the mouse, click where I want to be, and return my hands to the home row.

That's not to say Vim's keyboard capabilities aren't useful--they are! Sometimes you just want to move a character over, sometimes you need to justify a paragraph (gqap, or |fmt). But I'll contend that in general, when you want to move to a point in the text, using the mouse pointer to point where you want is the easiest.

When I need a shopkeeper to grab something off the shelf (maybe my favorite dirty magazine, I don't know), I don't say "ok 3 rows down from the top, 7 columns in, no sorry one more column to the right, that's it". I point and say, "I want that one".

[eropple]

Sure. And don't get me wrong--I use them! (Though I will admit that also use that touchy-pointy thing that's bolted on below my spacebar for getting around too, which I never did on Windows or Linux.) But when I need to move character-by-character, for me, it makes way more logical sense to use the things with the left, right, up, and down marks on them because that's what they're there for. hjkl doesn't make sense to me, so I don't use it.

(Something like HJUK--or even just WASD--would make more sense to me, but I don't care enough to start remapping all the live-long day.)