I don't know how can I go about measuring this (tho should not be that hard to come up with a scheme), but I'd rather not bother. One fact is that, on the keyb

I don't know how can I go about measuring this (tho should not be that hard to come up with a scheme), but I'd rather not bother. One fact is that, on the keyboard I'm looking at, which is a laptop keyboard with a numpad, the home-end bunch are above the numpad, and the up arrow aligns with the enter key, the right arrow becoming a part of the numpad block, right under one. I have to move my hands to be able to use them. I can use the arrow keys with my right pinky, but that requires contorting the hand. Moving my hand either to the home-end row or to the arrow keys takes about a second, and if I'm not looking at them, I usually hit the wrong key, (usually PrtSc instead of home, so also some surprise there), whereas C/M-{FBNPAEfbnpae} are about always right under my hand. I write both prose and code in Emacs, each and every day, and I haven't counted, but I use those keys quite a bit when typing stuff in. Assuming I use them a hundred times a day (quite low of an estimate), I save about 200 seconds/day. Yes that's marginal, in numbers, but in effect, it makes it so that typing is way less burdensome. Not having to relocate the home row enables me to type more accurately without having to see where I am on the keyboard, and to delete mistaken characters when I haven't correctly located F and J under my indices, and I count that a gain, adding to that the many other keybindings in Emacs that use the FBNP keys in some ways.