Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> For example, on my keyboard I have no dedicated cursor-keys, but they are mapped to hjkl and wasd with a thumb-key.

That sounds so bizarre to me, as so many keychords I use every minute of every day involve modifiers plus arrow keys.



Where do you put your thumb when you are using arrow keys? Maybe it's my small hands, but I can't use my right hand thumb to hit anything when I'm on arrow keys, and have to rely on using left hand to press modifiers.

So, I use a keyboard with split space bars, and map the right one to a layer switch key, when I want arrow keys I then hold the right side spacebar, and use ijkl (similar shape to arrow keys). Feels like exactly the same [1] as using arrow keys except I don't have to move my hand.

[1] Okay, 'I' is slightly off because row-staggered nonsense but honestly it just took me two days to get familiar to it.


I'd say the majority of office jobs won't really use arrow keys. Most people will rather use the mouse to move around, and engineers would use something closer to the center of the keyboard (like hjkl).


I have capslock mapped to ESC&CTRL, so my pinky is also around the important modifiers. And because of vim and gaming, hjkl & wsad are habitual for me anyway.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: