vim-colemak
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jooize
use the home row for moving around
The reason why Vim moves the home row one key to the left is that on qwerty the rightmost key in the home row is the semi-column. That's not the case in Colemak though, so why not fix it?
I use Kinesis keyboard, so it makes much more sense for me to use the home row as it's intended, so a while back I forked this repo and move the keys. Is this something you'd consider?
My fork is located at https://github.com/kalbasit/vim-colemak (see README).
You suggest NEIO for HJKL instead of HNEI? It seems like that would make more sense, but I think I wouldn't prefer it because my accuracy with little finger is worse than with ring finger. Additionally, I prefer keeping the physical position of those actions to avoid further complicating required brain wiring.
Should we make vim-colemak mappings more flexible?
@jooize precisely. It does for sure require a different habit than the QWERTY keyboard, but isn't that the point anyway? Since we are on Colemak, we don't suffer from having the ; under the pinkie, so I decided to move it one key to the right, and it's been working great!
I'd love to have that option so I don't have to maintain my fork. I'd love to even see it defaulting to NEIO so new users get used to using the right way.
HNEI makes the most sense ergonomically. The majority of the load is placed on the two strongest fingers of the hand -- and I believe they have separate tendons as well, unlike what would occur if one were to use NEIO instead.
Inter-line movement (down and up) is far more common than intra-line movement (left and right). Especially with set relativenumber. And we already have much more useful left/right movement operators with w, b, e, f, and t. The only remaining vertical keys j and k should have priority placement on the home row's stronger fingers. (In fact, I think w and e's present placement on y and u should be swapped for a similar reason of giving greater load to the stronger fingers, but that's a different issue.)
One "compromise" is:
n down
e up
i left
o right
...but I'm not sure that it's worth the slight reduction in muscle memory.
