I ultimately did the same. I doubt anyone else will ever use it, but it was fun to create and it suits me (almost) perfectly. There's something comfortable about knowing every detail of the environment I spend most of my day using; it has every feature I use regularly and none of the ones I don't.

Interesting that you are also a Dvorak user. I originally learned to type on a Dvorak keyboard, and have only ever been able to hunt-and-peck on QWERTY. I imagine that vim's interface might seem like less of an incomprehensible, memory-dependent maze if one's fingers were accustomed to QWERTY. I tried to learn it once, with a little cheat sheet taped to my monitor, but I've never been any good at rote memorization, so I didn't really get anywhere with it and went back to nano.

I switched to Colemak last year, and decided not to do any remapping. After a few weeks, I had no problems using Vim with the new layout. It helps that Colemak doesn't completely rearrange the keyboard.

Now my problem is that using Vim with any layout other than Colemak (read: QWERTY) is awkward.

I'm a little surprised there isnt some kind of standardized Dvorak compatibility layer by now

You should open source it. I find it interesting that there is so little exploration of how an editor should work outside of the emacs and vim models. It is like those are the only two possible ways.

Did.

https://github.com/pklausler/aoeui

In my head that's pronounced like, "Yowie!" I was just wondering how you pronounce it.

It's spelled 'aoeui' but it's pronounced 'Throat-Warbler Mangrove'.

I thought it would be 'luxury yacht' ;)

Good name for a Dvorak optimized editor

aoeui ~ qwerty (but on a different row)

There is third model in GUI apps: ^C copy, ^V paste, ^S save, ^F find, ^H find&replace, ^G goto, shift+cursors selects text.

Which is the model I use in the console text editor I wrote for my own use: http://hisham.hm/dit/

(Incidentally, I am _also_ a Dvorak user! How many of us Dvorak-users-with-homegrown-editors are there?)

Sure, good point. You have the Sublime/Textmate/Atom model too. I was talking among TUI editors.

While we're on the topic of other editors - I found an editor that I could customize to work exactly the way I want (https://howl.io).

And yes, I've used Emacs and written elisp to try and do the same - it just wasn't friendly enough for me.