Does anyone know why the decision was made to make hjkl the vi navigation button... | Hacker News

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dcosson on Aug 29, 2011 | parent | context | favorite | on: Learn Vim Progressively

Does anyone know why the decision was made to make hjkl the vi navigation buttons? I've always felt like jkl; would be faster since your fingers are already there

qxb on Aug 29, 2011 [–]

As I understand it, vi's author, Bill Joy, used a terminal that placed arrow symbols on hjkl because it did not have dedicated arrow keys.

Wikipedia backs up this story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HJKL_keys#HJKL_keys

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