h,j,k,l in vi

[C. J. Sampson]

>Great. Now if we can only get those who do remember history to forget it,
>so we can do things right.  One of the things that bothers me most about
>BSD is the habit of taking a mediocre implementation of a good idea, and
>using it over and over again.  To wit: nearly every thing that needs motion
>on a screen uses the "vi" command set (plug: see dbell at daisy's *very* slick
>life for an example), and far to many things (more than 0) have files that
>look like /etc/termcap.

  I have two points to make here:

  1) I feel that the [hjkl] set of cursor keys is very convienent.  I don't
     have to take my hands off of home row to move around, and this speeds
     up my editing.  I don't like using arrow keys for the same reason that
     I don't like using a mouse: it forces me to take my hand off the proper
     place in the keyboard, and then I have to take the time to put it back
     in the proper place and make sure it is aligned correctly.

  2) That fact that the large majority of programs use [hjkl] for cursor
     movement is good.  This is known as consistency.  Since most programs
     use them, you don't have to learn a new set of cursor keys whenever
     you switch from rogue to snake.  I'd rather not fumble around every
     time I start a new program that needs cursor control.  Consistency
     in general makes a lot of things far more easily understandable.
     If you see a file containing several items seperated by colons on
     each line, you can make the assumption that the colon is a delimiter,
     because it was done that way before.  Better one consistent mediocore
     implementation than several hundred good implementations.

=====================================================================
	Curt Sampson		ihnp4!alberta!jeff
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"It looked like something resembling white marble, which was probably
 what is was: something resembling white marble."