Linux Productivity Magazine: VI and Vim

“Who would guess to press ‘l’ to go right. Shouldn’t ‘l’ go
left? What in the world is the rationale for using ‘h’ to go right?
One would think ‘h’ would mean ‘higher’ or some such thing. ‘j’ and
‘k’ for down and up respectively is just plain weird. And how
strange is the 2 mode system, where the insert mode is for typing,
and the command mode is for editing, necessitating constant
switching between them. Many VI implementations cannot even
facilitate a mouse, nor can they highlight text with the
Shift+Arrow hotkey, nor skip words with Ctrl+Arrow. As a modern
software developer I’ve been trained to make my apps intuitive.

“But anyone who has been around the block a few times knows
there’s a tradeoff between beginner’s intuitiveness and master’s
productivity. VI has been optimized entirely for the touch typist.
l, h, j and k are easily touch typing home position accessible.
Cursor (arrow) keys are not. In the time you can move your hand
from the keyboard to the mouse, a VI master can cut the current
paragraph and move it above the preceding paragraph. (Keystrokes
{d}{P}). VI is built exclusively for speed. Well, almost
exclusively.

“VI is built for power too. By combining VI’s range enabled
global commands, range enabled search and replace commands, regular
expressions, macros and scripts, you can effect almost any
conceivable transformation on a file. If the transformation can be
described in English, it can be done with VI. And in VI it usually
can be done in 1/10 the time required to write a program to perform
the same transformation…”

Complete
Story