> The use of the HJKL keys for moving the cursor in the vi editor and its descendants originated from the ADM-3A [...] The ←, ↓, ↑, → and Home labels printed on the H, J, K, L, and ~ ^ keys were a visual reference to the control characters Ctrl+H, Ctrl+J, Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ that were required to move the cursor left, down, up, right, and to the top/left corner (or "Home" position) of the terminal, respectively [...] The Ctrl+H and Ctrl+J functions were the standard ASCII backspace and line feed respectively, but the interpretations of Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ were new to the ADM-3A.
Seems almost a happy accident. I personally like the placement because the most common movement in a document is down and it's placed right under the most dextrous finger, the index finger, by a coincidence between ASCII encoding and QWERTY layouts. Up being the second most common movement was put under the second most dextrous finger. Nice.
(j = downarrow was a mnemonic I used while learning vim.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#/media/File:KB_Terminal...
I knew a developer who had one.
Nope, j is down. J combines the current line with the next line, reducing whitespace between to 1 space.
Back when I first figured out what J was doing (having typo'd it regularly) I thought it was useless, then one day I just started reflexively using it when manipulating function arguments.
Likewise, k is up, K looks up the word under the cursor in a man page.
And so J stands for Join (the next line to the current line), IIRC.
H = the leftmost key, so left L = the rightmost key, so right J = jeet (yeet), so down K = klimb (climb), so up
I look forward to the day this is just burned into my subconscious, but until then, this works I suppose
Does the analogy hold for ^M which is carriage return?
Anyway, I remember that stuff. Had a lot of "fun" on Unixes back in the day using things like ^J, ^M, ^H, stty sane, stty -a, stty icrnl, stty onlcr (or is it the other way around), fiddling with termcap and terminfo, and much more ...
When I first switched to Colemak, around 2010, I remapped the movement keys so that they were in the same physical location as hjkl on qwerty.
Then I realised I'd lost compatibility with other readline based software. So I just learned to use the new, not particularly ergonomic, positions under Colemak.
At this point it's almost always from muscle memory now and couldn't tell you what I press half the time.
Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction and using it since the 90s has been like learning to play a musical instrument.
Actually vim is more like the Great Glass Elevator cum Excavator, because it has buttons and levers (to extend your simile) for moving in every direction and performing operations of every kind, and most importantly, all sorts of combinations of the two:
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018215
So, if tomorrow, either more movements or more operations were added to vim, they would automatically play well with the older ones.
This is orthogonality (1), and genius, IMO :)
(1) As they mean in microprocessor ISA design (, I think, not being a hardware guy, but have just read about it a little here and there, while doing assembly language programming years ago).
vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, if the Great Glass Elevator was modal
I've had the same PIN code for over 20 years.
It's funny you mention that. Just today, I had this moment where I realized that if someone asked me which key letters are used to move up/down/left/right, I'd have to pause and think about it.
I've been using Vim for years. Like, my index finger rests on the down key, so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up? Do I actually have to move my index finger to go left? What is my pinky doing most of the time?
It's just funny how all this stuff is burned into my brain but I wouldn't even be able to tell someone the basics without a keyboard in front of me.