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From: soh@shiva.trl.oz (kam hung soh)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Whence vi's hjkl?
Message-ID: <3380@trlluna.trl.oz>
Date: 16 Apr 91 22:47:07 GMT
References: <1991Apr15.021544.19067@umbc3.umbc.edu> <1991Apr15.211355.7919@ukpoit.co.uk>
Sender: news@trlluna.trl.oz
Lines: 25

alan@ukpoit.co.uk (Alan Barclay) writes:
>2) If you're a touch typist then 'u','d','l','r' seems as natural as
>you can get....

Ahhh, but this implied the typist had to be English.  If he were Malay
or Indonesian, it would be 'Atas', 'Bawah', 'Kiri', 'Kanan'
(unfortunately, I don't know of an easy word which describes "left"
and "right" with a different first letter.)  I wonder what they would
be in other languages?

To quote from a paper by Bill Joy in 1980 (`An Introduction to Display
Editing with Vi'): "If you don't have cursor positioning keys, or even
if you do, you can use the h j k and l keys as cursor positioning keys
(these are labelled with arrows on an adm3a)."

To try to justify this choice for other terminals, there is a footnote
to the previous statement: "As we will see later, h moved back to the
left (like control-h which is a backspace), j moves down (in the same
column), k moves up (in the same column), and l moves to the right.

Regards,

--------------
Soh, Kam Hung      email: h.soh@trl.oz.au     tel: +61 03 541 6403 
Telecom Research Laboratories, P.O. Box 249, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia