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History of Emacs ＆ vi Keys (Keyboard Influence on Keybinding Design) (2010)
- nikatwork 13y ago> Num Lock on the number keypad also is a relic Using the numeric keypad as directional arrows can be more comfortable when gaming. I personally prefer to use it as arrows when gaming and numbers when working. I would not buy a keyboard lacking a Num Lock key.
- petepete 13y agoMy keyboard has no 'lock' keys and I can't say I miss them (I don't recall using any of them intentionally, ever). I can understand the keypad being more comfortable for certain games, but it's an edge case.
- mjn 13y agoA lot of older games would map the numbers 2/4/6/8 as aliases for the arrow keys, so it'd work regardless of what position the numlock was in. Seems to have gotten less common.
- siddboots 13y agoQuake 1 did this, iirc. From what I remember, game studios around that time played around with different bindings, but generally stuck with keyboard only bindings by default, because mouse+keyboard was still considered an "advanced user" technique. For the most part, game makers adapted to how the users were playing (WASD) rather than setting a standard and expecting users to follow.
- beaumartinez 13y agoIt's especially useful as a left-handed gamer. Right-handed gamers have the mouse on the right and use WASD for movement—and there's a comfortable distance between the two. Left-handed gamers have the mouse on the left—using WASD feels very cramped. The benefit of using WASD for movement though is that there are a plethora of keys in its vicinity that can be remapped. With the numpad, not so much.
- clicks 13y agoInteresting that a Xah Lee site has made it to the front page, most of his stuff had been totally banned on HN. Ah well. The guy may be a strange individual but he's certainly done good in proliferating a ton of helpful documentation literature on *nix stuff.
- e40 13y agoHis rants and trolls on comp.lang.lisp in the heyday of that group were epic... and annoying. He does seem to have matured somewhat.
- zarify 13y agoHuh. Odd that he reckons IJKL would be better for vim keys considering you'd have to use the same finger for up and down, while using HJKL you can use different fingers for up and down as well as left and right.
- chao- 13y agoYeah, he doesn't really present any logic for that, either. As if he's starting from the discrete arrow keys and making an assumption that this is an optimal placement. I remember struggling with up/down on arrow keys as a child, thinking it should be more like a cross, with a space between down and up, or with the left/right keys centered on the gap between up and down. Edit: Echoing asdfs's comment elsewhere in the thread, I think that jkl; would be an alternative with actual, arguable benefits.
- xahlee 13y agohere's what i think. in both ijkl and hjkl, you have one finger doing 2 keys. In vi, it's pointing finger doing hj, moving side ways. In ijkl, it's middle finger doing up down. So i think ijkl is slightly better. I remember seeing similar analysis on coleman forum.
- zarify 13y agoI see what you mean about the 1 finger 2 keys bit, but I find I tend to either be moving up and down lines or left and right in a line. With HJKL I'm then using two separate fingers for navigation horizontally and vertically. If I used IJKL I'd be using a single finger when moving vertically and two fingers horizontally. I'm curious as to what people who spend more time in vim than I do think about that. Personally it seems more comfortable to be using different fingers rather than shifting when going up/down.
- ordinary 13y agoI'm not a vi user, but wouldn't you shift your hand one key to the left when navigating?
- johnchristopher 13y ago
- siddboots 13y ago> ... vi's {H J K L} is still pretty good, but better is {I J K L}... You've got some nerve, guy.
- chao- 13y agoUsing this to bring up something related, which I have always wondered: How do you orient your hands when performing ⌘+Z/X/C when using a Mac keyboard? Which finger presses the ⌘? Having used Windows as a child and Linux for many years since, I'm sure a large part is "you get used to whatever you use". However, any time I borrow a friend's Apple laptop to demonstrate something, I always waste a few cycles thinking about just how I should really be dealing with the keyboard, and never really settle on an answer. At its core, I love the idea of the ⌘ key: Something for shortcuts in GUI applications so that Ctrl can remain for sending Unix Signals. But it's position, combined with the lack of discrete Home, End, PgUp, or PgDn, is a majority of what keeps me from buying a Macintosh laptop. Also the whole function key deal. The keyboard is such an important source of my productivity.
- reubenmorais 13y agoI, and all OS X users I know, use the thumb to press command. I rarely need to use home/end, since control-A and control-E work in all text fields. PgUp and PgDn are fn+up/fn+down, but I never use those.
- chao- 13y ago>I rarely need to use home/end, since control-A and control-E work in all text fields. Interesting. If I can remember that and keep it in mind, I'll be far less jumpy and clunky next time I'm typing on a Mac. Thanks! On the note of PgUp and PgDn, I suppose I mostly use them for tab navigation: Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn works as a "Next Tab" and "Previous Tab" in pretty much every tabbed Linux application I've used. I recall it being almost universal in Windows as well. Is there an OS X equivalent shortcut for Next/Prev Tab?
- ghosTM55 13y agoAwesome!
- asdfs 13y agoI do wish that it had been 'JKL;' instead of 'HJKL'. Pulling my fingers from their resting position has always bothered me.
- johnchristopher 13y agoThat vi keyboard is bleeding minimalism in constrast to the lisp keyboard.
- penguindev 13y agoYep, and notice where the ctrl is. I just mapped my caps lock to control a few days ago (mac os makes it super easy to do this), and I love it. I should have done it friggin ages ago. I also started using the leader key (\) in vim, another thing long overdue. That's in an easy location on that old keyboard too.
- johnchristopher 13y agoI rarely use the CTRL key in vim and unfortunately my CAPSLOCK key is bound to SUPER for easy tag switching in awesome-wm. I think I am missing on some of vim's core features because of that. I already saw huge improvements when switching to US-International layout and it smoothed things in vim too. Free tip: ~ $ echo 'imap jj <ESC>' >> .vimrc jj being a rare combination in insert mode it makes a nice pinky-safe ESC move.
- Zakharov 13y agoWhat annoys me is keyboards that don't have a pause music button, but have a pause button that does precisely nothing.
- lubomir 13y agoThe SysRq key is not so useless as the article would let you believe. Under Linux, it allows one to send commands to kernel to e.g. reboot the system [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key