This is actually a huge pain for me.

I should have mentioned that another thing that can get you more intimate with vim keyboard shortcuts is trying out one of the vim browser plugins. I use vimium on chrome and vimperator on FF. These give you a number of the keys you're used to using in vim like gg, G, and even / search.

Gmail binds those keys, but I'm so used to scrolling up and down with j/k that the action Google chose is infuriating. What's worse is that turning the keyboard shortcut option off in gmail still captures the key press event, but silences it, effectively breaking my favorite plugin.

They offer 'basic html' mode, which turns off the bells and whistles (and makes it load much faster). It plays much more nicely with vimperator that way.

with vimperator you can press ctrl+z to enable pass-through mode, therefore allowing you to use the gmail shortcut keys, press escape to go back to normal mode.

Thanks for the heads up. That is quite convenient, unfortunately I'm now using vimium. I'm reminded that in my vimperator days gmail wasn't a problem because the vi key bindings just worked everywhere. All this is moot considering I can just patch the plugins. I assume vimium either has a similar capability or that it can easily be added, but it does allow a web app to trap key strokes before by default (opposite of vimperator)

Unfortunately, unless I can rebind those keys, such short-cuts are totally irrelevant for people who actually care about comfort and speed: H, J, K, and L are not aligned at all in my ergonomic layout.