5 ms·

I want to meet a dvorak keyboard user who is passionate about vi.

Lio 15y ago
I'm a Colemak user and still really like Vim. I have to do a bit of mapping to get things comfortable but still it works well for me.
- stevelosh 15y ago
  I've been learning Colemak off and on and am a bit worried about using it with Vim. What mappings do you use (particularly for hjkl)? My first instinct was to map them to something more comfortable, but lots of other apps use those keybindings so I feel like it might be better to just learn to use them as-is.
- dkersten 15y ago
  I switched to Colemak (and a DAS keyboard) about two and a half months ago. Any details about your mapping that you could share would be appreciated.
TomasSedovic 15y ago
Pleasure to meet you. Not sure how much passion you require. I'm not exactly head-over-heels with vim, but I have been using it for about 7 years and dvorak for about 3. Anything in particular you want to ask?
- dasil003 15y ago
  I imagine the mnemonics make it work reasonably well, but what about hjkl? Do you really get used to having those spread around?
  - TomasSedovic 15y ago
    Yeah. Adjusting to typing in Dvorak took me considerably more time and effort that getting used to the new shortcuts. Luckily, Dvorak isn't that bad for this. For instance, 'j' (down arrow) and 'k' (up arrow) are still next to each other, in the same order. 'h' (left arrow) and 'l' (right arrow) are not, but when you have your right hand in the starting position, their location and distance is very similar to where they are on QWERTY. As a side note, it's much harder to type QWERTY on Dvorak. Now, the arrow keys no longer in the same place -- up/down is on the left side of the keyboard whilst left/right is on the right side. But that's not as big a problem as you may think -- provided you keep both your hands on the keyboard. Interestingly, the Kinesis Contoured keyboards [1] have the arrows similarly separated. And there are no "gotchas" where the keys' position would go against the spatial intent. You could imagine a layout that would for instance have ctrl-f (page down) located below ctrl-b (page up) or 'h' (left arrow) on the right side of 'l' (left arrow). But that's not the case in Dvorak neither for vim nor for the emacs keybindings that I'm familiar with (c-b, c-f, c-a, c-e). Sheer dumb luck, methinks. Both under vim and under Gnome in general, I've found that all the shortcuts I'm using aren't that much worse off. Some are actually better. It seems to pretty much balance out. [1]: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm
    - tikhonj 15y ago
      Heh, not at all related, but do you really find it harder to type qwerty? I personally find that typing a bunch of letters that are all beside each other is actually harder than typing normal words.
  - w0utert 15y ago
    If you're a little pragmatic about it like me, you can still use the arrow keys to move around, at least in vim this works out of the box. I've been using VIM for over a decade now, and learned to make good use of many of its features, but I've never had the urge to stop using the arrow keys. Except when working remotely to some ancient Sun or HP box that only has vi, or some crappy terminal settings that mess up the arrow keys. The idea behind hjkl is that it's supposed to be faster because you don't have to move your hands away from the letter keys, but in practice, I don't actually move around in single-character increments that much when editing anyway. All I want now is XCode with VIM bindings :-(
  - hudibras 15y ago
    I remapped hjkl to htns (the keys directly under the right fingers on the home row) and it works wonderfully. 'n' then needs to be remapped, so I have 'N' set to 'j' and 'n' set to 'k' so that the two commands for repeating a search forward or backward are adjacent keys on the Dvorak keyboard. No other changes required. I don't use vim's 't' or 's' commands, so no problem there.
- techiferous 15y ago
  Hi TomasSedovic! > Anything in particular you want to ask? Just wondering how much dvorak gets in the way of vi/vim. Lots of wonderful answers showed up in this thread! Looks like dvorak is a small obstacle (because of hjkl) but not a show-stopper.
  - TomasSedovic 15y ago
    That's been my experience at least. But remember that this is very subjective and different people will have different habits. It's quite possible that there are shortcuts that get crippled by the Dvorak layout -- I'm just not aware of them. Also, muscle memory is a strong thing. Expect at least the first few days to be slow and painful. And as such, it's quite possible that all my positive experience now is due to cognitive dissonance.
andrewaylett 15y ago
I use vim a lot, but I only really started using it for most of my work in a job I had after switching to Dvorak -- was primarily an Emacs user before that.
mmavnn 15y ago
Not sure about passionate, but I like it enough that I use VsVim for my day job (.net developer). I actually started using Dvorak before picking up vi; never had a problem with the keyboard mappings. It helps that j and k are still next to each other, and h is to the left of l.
phlyingpenguin 15y ago
I'm extremely passionate about vim, and I cannot type with a plain QWERTY keyboard. It's really not a big deal. I remap h,j,k,l to d,h,t,n (and n to l so I can search) and I'm off to go. The one problem I have is that my vimrc/.vim stuff is all customized far enough that I can never use any of the vim-like emulated modes in other text editors. I think evil-mode may be possible if I wanted to learn how to configure emacs at all, but it's generally not worth the hassle. I'm not sure about the particular Visual Studio plugin that the link is to, but one of the two doesn't allow remaps, for instance. It's generally not a problem to use j/k for short periods of time at least. My big problem Dvorak wise is Nethack which is sort of a pain. I bought a Qido USB layout switcher to make games like that possible.
nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
I'm one of the really blasphemous vi nuts who uses both Dvorak and the arrow keys for movement. I keep a very minimal vimrc, and I don't use or remap the standard hjkl keys. But that means I can also seamlessy switch between multiple IDE's with vi-compatible modes, and have zero problems using vi/vim on machines that don't yet have my vimrc set up. I feel that it gives me a superior editor with a superior keyboard layout, and the flexibility to use some of the best tools for the job. For the record, I use a "Tenkeyless" [1] quality keyboard, and depending on what languages I'm working on, I use: - vi/vim for editing one-off files or small, isolated projects - Sublime Text 2 with vintage mode for Python or PHP projects - Eclipse with Vrapper for Java/Android projects - Visual Studio with the OP's ViEmu plugin for C#/Xna projects I'm pretty freakin' happy with my setup. 1: http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=leopold,tenkeyless&pid=fc200rtabn http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=leopold,tenkeyles...

Lio 15y ago

I'm a Colemak user and still really like Vim. I have to do a bit of mapping to get things comfortable but still it works well for me.

stevelosh 15y ago
I've been learning Colemak off and on and am a bit worried about using it with Vim. What mappings do you use (particularly for hjkl)? My first instinct was to map them to something more comfortable, but lots of other apps use those keybindings so I feel like it might be better to just learn to use them as-is.
dkersten 15y ago
I switched to Colemak (and a DAS keyboard) about two and a half months ago. Any details about your mapping that you could share would be appreciated.

TomasSedovic 15y ago

Pleasure to meet you. Not sure how much passion you require. I'm not exactly head-over-heels with vim, but I have been using it for about 7 years and dvorak for about 3. Anything in particular you want to ask?

dasil003 15y ago
I imagine the mnemonics make it work reasonably well, but what about hjkl? Do you really get used to having those spread around?
- TomasSedovic 15y ago
  Yeah. Adjusting to typing in Dvorak took me considerably more time and effort that getting used to the new shortcuts. Luckily, Dvorak isn't that bad for this. For instance, 'j' (down arrow) and 'k' (up arrow) are still next to each other, in the same order. 'h' (left arrow) and 'l' (right arrow) are not, but when you have your right hand in the starting position, their location and distance is very similar to where they are on QWERTY. As a side note, it's much harder to type QWERTY on Dvorak. Now, the arrow keys no longer in the same place -- up/down is on the left side of the keyboard whilst left/right is on the right side. But that's not as big a problem as you may think -- provided you keep both your hands on the keyboard. Interestingly, the Kinesis Contoured keyboards [1] have the arrows similarly separated. And there are no "gotchas" where the keys' position would go against the spatial intent. You could imagine a layout that would for instance have ctrl-f (page down) located below ctrl-b (page up) or 'h' (left arrow) on the right side of 'l' (left arrow). But that's not the case in Dvorak neither for vim nor for the emacs keybindings that I'm familiar with (c-b, c-f, c-a, c-e). Sheer dumb luck, methinks. Both under vim and under Gnome in general, I've found that all the shortcuts I'm using aren't that much worse off. Some are actually better. It seems to pretty much balance out. [1]: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm
  - tikhonj 15y ago
    Heh, not at all related, but do you really find it harder to type qwerty? I personally find that typing a bunch of letters that are all beside each other is actually harder than typing normal words.
- w0utert 15y ago
  If you're a little pragmatic about it like me, you can still use the arrow keys to move around, at least in vim this works out of the box. I've been using VIM for over a decade now, and learned to make good use of many of its features, but I've never had the urge to stop using the arrow keys. Except when working remotely to some ancient Sun or HP box that only has vi, or some crappy terminal settings that mess up the arrow keys. The idea behind hjkl is that it's supposed to be faster because you don't have to move your hands away from the letter keys, but in practice, I don't actually move around in single-character increments that much when editing anyway. All I want now is XCode with VIM bindings :-(
- hudibras 15y ago
  I remapped hjkl to htns (the keys directly under the right fingers on the home row) and it works wonderfully. 'n' then needs to be remapped, so I have 'N' set to 'j' and 'n' set to 'k' so that the two commands for repeating a search forward or backward are adjacent keys on the Dvorak keyboard. No other changes required. I don't use vim's 't' or 's' commands, so no problem there.
techiferous 15y ago
Hi TomasSedovic! > Anything in particular you want to ask? Just wondering how much dvorak gets in the way of vi/vim. Lots of wonderful answers showed up in this thread! Looks like dvorak is a small obstacle (because of hjkl) but not a show-stopper.
- TomasSedovic 15y ago
  That's been my experience at least. But remember that this is very subjective and different people will have different habits. It's quite possible that there are shortcuts that get crippled by the Dvorak layout -- I'm just not aware of them. Also, muscle memory is a strong thing. Expect at least the first few days to be slow and painful. And as such, it's quite possible that all my positive experience now is due to cognitive dissonance.

andrewaylett 15y ago

I use vim a lot, but I only really started using it for most of my work in a job I had after switching to Dvorak -- was primarily an Emacs user before that.

mmavnn 15y ago

Not sure about passionate, but I like it enough that I use VsVim for my day job (.net developer). I actually started using Dvorak before picking up vi; never had a problem with the keyboard mappings. It helps that j and k are still next to each other, and h is to the left of l.

phlyingpenguin 15y ago

I'm extremely passionate about vim, and I cannot type with a plain QWERTY keyboard. It's really not a big deal. I remap h,j,k,l to d,h,t,n (and n to l so I can search) and I'm off to go. The one problem I have is that my vimrc/.vim stuff is all customized far enough that I can never use any of the vim-like emulated modes in other text editors. I think evil-mode may be possible if I wanted to learn how to configure emacs at all, but it's generally not worth the hassle. I'm not sure about the particular Visual Studio plugin that the link is to, but one of the two doesn't allow remaps, for instance. It's generally not a problem to use j/k for short periods of time at least. My big problem Dvorak wise is Nethack which is sort of a pain. I bought a Qido USB layout switcher to make games like that possible.

nuclear_eclipse 15y ago

I'm one of the really blasphemous vi nuts who uses both Dvorak and the arrow keys for movement. I keep a very minimal vimrc, and I don't use or remap the standard hjkl keys. But that means I can also seamlessy switch between multiple IDE's with vi-compatible modes, and have zero problems using vi/vim on machines that don't yet have my vimrc set up. I feel that it gives me a superior editor with a superior keyboard layout, and the flexibility to use some of the best tools for the job. For the record, I use a "Tenkeyless" [1] quality keyboard, and depending on what languages I'm working on, I use: - vi/vim for editing one-off files or small, isolated projects - Sublime Text 2 with vintage mode for Python or PHP projects - Eclipse with Vrapper for Java/Android projects - Visual Studio with the OP's ViEmu plugin for C#/Xna projects I'm pretty freakin' happy with my setup. 1: http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=leopold,tenkeyless&pid=fc200rtabn http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=leopold,tenkeyles...