gnaa… correction fail, call me idiot!
vi is older, but nethack is a clone of something thats older then vi

nethack is older…

@Jaded Judas: Or maybe nethack was designed to train people Vi? It could go both ways. ;)

Concerning the “HJKL” movement keys:

I always thought that the vi movement keys were intended to train people to play nethack. Nethack, of course, uses the “HJKL” movement keys.

Just my thoughts on the matter….

I have the numpad overlaid on my home row on my MacBook and I can’t ever be arsed to use it — because I have to go fishing for that pesky “fn” key with my left hand. That usually requires me to take my left hand completely off the keyboard, my eyes off the screen and look around for it. It’s easier and faster for me just to hit the number row without looking.

The opposite is true for some reason when I’m using VI on this keyboard. I find it easy to find the arrow and escape keys without looking. I just shift my hand down and I’m in business.

@Dr. Azrael Tod: Good point. Though, I don’t know if touch typists would approve. The problem is that we have this keyboard layout that everyone is familiar with and changing the even little things makes people upset. I’d argue that putting movement keys in between character keys could potentially hurt the typing speed by putting the keys apart and making them harder to reach for people with small hands.

Gaming is a special case because it is modal by definition. Game takes over your keyboard and thus you can map WASD to movement quite easily.

I despise most laptop keyboards for messing around with the right side of the keyboard.

why should having some dedicated arrow-keys and having the movement-keys located near your char-keys be mutually exclusive? just asking..

there even ARE Keyboards out there, defining a special set of movement-keys in between all of your chars. The Problem is: They are designed for Gaming, so there is the double-definition of up-w, left-a and so on.

I dont get why it should be more confusing to have the arrow-keys in between the keys where all the actions will be.

BTW: my Medion Akoya Netbook does a nice Trick for faster movement with arrow-keys allready. They are located directly horizontally aligned to space and vertically between return and ctrl.
This is part one, what only makes me needing much less way to move.
Part two is, that they have doubled functionality (up=screen up, down=screen down, pos1 and end)
At first you might search this keys.. but it makes totaly f*ckin sense! If i press left, i go left. If i press ctrl+left i go faster left (one word instead of one letter) and if i press function left i go fastest left!

My left hand is positioned on shift, alt, ctrl and space anyway.. so why not?