The idea is that your fingers should leave the home row as little as possible while editing. I'm not saying that you should glue your hands to your desk, I'm sa

The idea is that your fingers should leave the home row as little as possible while editing. I'm not saying that you should glue your hands to your desk, I'm saying that while in the flow of editing, your hands should remain in one place. Regular typing provides an instructive example here. Try typing a long sentence right now. If you're a touch typist, you can notice that your fingers very rarely leave the home row. Even if you're pressing shift or enter, you can basically just stretch your hand a little bit, but you can reach all the letter keys and the spacebar without moving your hands. You get into a flow where your hands remain basically fixed and the typing just flows out of you very comfortably (I'm doing it right now). However, if you decide you need to use the arrow keys, you need to move your right hand quite a distance, and it interrupts the "typing" flow. Keyboards are designed to make this comfortable, that's why there's those little nubbins on F and J so that you always know where your home row is and where your hands are inside of it. One of the ideas with Vim's editing commands is that editing text should become as natural as typing text is, since that's what you're doing most of the time as a coder. Imagine typing regularly and having to move your entire right hand every fifth keystroke. It would be pretty terrible. I can personally attest that it works, and that I've very glad I rid myself of those arrow keys for regular editing. Moving to a different window doesn't happen in the middle of the "flow" (just like Alt-Tab, or changing volume or whatever doesn't), so it's fine to use them for that. I can tell you're pretty set in your ways of how to use Vim, and that's fine: if you want to use the arrow keys, go ahead! There's no law against it, use Vim however you like. But what you're saying is essentially "all those people who say it's helpful not to use the arrow keys are lying or delusional!" I'm here to tell you that we're not. It really does work really well for us.