Zen

The Great Controversy

A standard dictum amongst experienced Vim users is not to use the arrow keys to move around your document. This dictum is often repeated again and again, in tones that range from the taken-for-granted to hysterical-zeal. The most common reason given for this is that using the arrow keys takes your hands away from the home row of your keyboard, and thus is wasteful both in terms of time and energy, whereas the standard Vim movement keys --- `h`, `j`, `k`, and `l` --- keep your hands on the home row, and therefore is far more efficient. Here is what I have discovered: this anti-arrow key argument is wrong!

I love text editors. Which is a good thing, because I spend the overwhelming majority of my computing time (and, hence, sadly, most of my conscious life) in one text editor or another. For years I have been an Emacs user, only relatively recently moving to BBEdit with my adoption/inheritance of a Mac as a personal machine. Using and often administrating Linux-based systems has necessitated that I use Vi now and then, but I have long held the opinion that the only Vi command one needs to know is: ":q!", perhaps to be followed by "emacs".

This attitude was born out of some unpleasant experiences really early on in my computing history. I distinctly remember a few occassions when I was trapped in an apparently psychotic terminal session that would not accept my typing despite dozens of increasingly-frenzied keystrokes, and then suddenly and inexplicably it started accepting my typing but refused to let me stop typing and exit. This was my introduction to the Vi editor. After once or twice resorting to disconnecting and relogging-in as the only way break out of the grip of this insane editor, I learned how to properly quit it: ":q!". For many years after that, those three keystrokes probably summed up 90-99% of my Vi usage: whenever I inadvertently triggered an editing session with it, I would quit it with alacrity and get on with life. It was a long while before I stopped getting a flash of a "Arrgh! Not again!" semi-panicky feeling whenever I saw a screen with all those tildes running down the left hand side. As far as I was concerned, a Vi session was synonymous with an operating system glitch or failure.

All that has recently radically changed ...