[sakjur]

That seems quite harsh. Just because the designers aren’t perfect doesn’t mean the design is universally bad.

To address your example: Why were the arrow keys on those particular keys? Who put them there? hjkl are on the home row, and touch typists end up having the movement keys under their right hand’s resting fingers. That’s suddenly quite convenient.

[eviks]

> and touch typists end up having the movement keys under their right hand’s resting fingers.

This is false, h isn't in the resting place. So go back and spend more time trying to explain that historic tidbid of design before trying to defend it (I'd also be curious to know why they shifted left instead of using resting places)!

Or don't and use this obvious principle directly and change keybinds to jkl;

Or go with the muscle memory of inverted T and use ijkl

But whatever you do, prioritizing the original design is a common bad heuristic because there is no reason to think that the original designer was great (not perfect!, don't twist it), so trying to understand the original reasons is a waste of "productivity" time (but if you're curious, it's not a waste of regular time)

[WesolyKubeczek]

> Why were the arrow keys on those particular keys? Who put them there?

They were placed on those particular keys by Lear Siegler who made the ADM-3A terminal Bill Joy was using at the time he made vi. End of story.

[bluebarbet]

As pointed out, this is wrong. What touch-typists want is jkl;, because the right home key is j. This is an absolutely necessary config change in vanilla vim, unfortunately.

[myfonj]

For me personally is the J/K direction still feels swapped and I always have to remind myself they are in fact the other way round. Even (especially) for touch typists, I would really expect [k] to point down and [j] up. In our writing system from the top left to bottom right my intuition would really be to stick ↑ with ← together and vice versa ↓ with →.

    ← ↓ ↑ →

makes a little sense to me.

    ← ↑ ↓ →

would be way better, IMO.

Not only because the most used used direction (↓) would be closer to my "neutral" finger position, but mainly because the the keys for progressing "back" and keys for progressing "forwards would be grouped together.

Honestly, I wouldn't even mind having them spread across two rows, like U I J K

    ↑  ↓
    ←  →

or something. (Personally, I have global WASD-like arrow mapping bound to IJKL through capslock combo in AutoHotkey, since sometimes cursor keys are really inconveniently far away when typing.)

[skydhash]

I like the bindings, because I move vertically more than I move, so I want my strongest (other than the thumb) there. And I move to the right more than I do to the left. So I don’t mind moving my finger to do the latter.

[esoterae]

As a touch typist that learned decades before learning vi, with Emacs in the middle, I can definitively say your blanket statement is false. And as a recovering Emacs user, I can also say the little finger thing for a repetitive key is a dangerous proposition with real potential health drawbacks.