3 ms·
^H, ^J, ^K, and ^L _had_ meaning and that meaning is why hjkl do what they do. Their location on the homerow of a number of layouts is an accident. And they are
by johncoltrane 3y ago
^H, ^J, ^K, and ^L _had_ meaning and that meaning is why hjkl do what they do. Their location on the homerow of a number of layouts is an accident. And they are not very useful in practice anyway.
"Remapping" the whole keyboard around them is IMO a silly idea.
- linsomniac 3y agoHow do vertical tab and form feed relate to "up" and "right"?
- johncoltrane 3y agoYou would have to ask to the engineers at Lear Siegler who made that decision many decades ago. That choice and the subsequent decision to print the arrows on the corresponding keys of a single model of their product line are why we got hjkl for cursor movement in Vi first… and now seemingly everywhere.
- eimrine 3y agoI would like to suppose this is what Home and End does on any modern keyboard.
- lupire 3y agoNope. hjkl are arrow keys. https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys
- johncoltrane 3y ago"hjkl are arrow keys" because the arrows are printed on them and the arrows are printed on hjkl because pressing ^H, ^J, ^K, and ^L is what moved the cursor on the screen of the ADM-3A.
- lupire 3y agoYes, and H, ^J, ^K, and ^L is what moved the cursor on the screen of the ADM-3A because they are on the home row.
- eimrine 3y ago> ^H, ^J, ^K, and ^L _had_ meaning I can parse only High and Low which is what ^H and ^L do.
- johncoltrane 3y agoOn the ADM-3A, moving the cursor on the screen was done by pressing ^H, ^J, ^K, ^L. The convention had been established by no-one-knows-who at Lear Siegler even before that specific terminal model came out.