If you're going to disable the mouse and the arrow keys and really commit to the home row, more power to you. That is probably the best way to master Vim. But I think a significant number of people looking at Vim tutorials have never used the editor, and I think they deserve to know that there is an easy way to make the editor more comfortable and more familiar.

Someone down-thread used a metaphor to say 'the best way to learn a new language is by immersion' which is something I would agree with. But opening Vim for the first time feels like being dropped into a foreign country where no one speaks your language. Imagine how frustrated you would be to find that the people there actually do speak a language that you know, they're just refusing to understand you because you haven't issued the magic words, "set mouse=a"

The people who seek out a "learn vim" course are just not that kind of people. In this case you've signed up for a course on how to speak Spanish only to ask the teacher to not speak Spanish.

Having mouse support gives you a superset of functionality. Often this can be useful, like if you have on your hand on the mouse using another application.

Saying "why even bother" using vim if you add features just makes no sense.

I felt the same way when first learning vim, since it was completely different from the code editors I'd used in the past, it was strange not being able to use the mouse in the way I was used to.

I find it much more useful to remove the ability to even do the wrong thing, than to simply try and will myself to do the right one.

Yes, exactly. This is analogous to travelling to another country and hoping to learn the local language by immersion. If you then meet people that speak your language you run the risk of only hanging out with your little expat group and never immersing yourself in the local culture. You can end up spending years there and never learning the language.

The remaining time I would edit code like normal with vscode, so it turned out that I wasn't really able to pick up vim and use it well.

It wasn't until I switched to a different keyboard layout that I decided to move over to vim cold turkey, and was actually able to learn vim and retain it.

I have done that briefly years ago but I find it a dead end.

After a while you just get used to the cursor keys being in a different place and if you’re touch typing it doesn’t mater much.

Also what you loose to cursor key placement you gain back on other navigation.

So in short just support qwerty and it’ll be fine.

IIRC dvorak even happens to split the vertical and horizontal movements between hands but while keeping them near each other, almost like RC car controls. Workman is comparatively a bit crazier with its placement, but it still doesn't bother me.

And while I'm diving into history here, vi (which stands for "visual") was a modification of "ex" to use the newfangled "video terminal" instead of the battle tested teletype machine.