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From: doug@eris.berkeley.edu (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Whence vi's hjkl?
Message-ID: <1991May2.193905.16971@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 2 May 91 19:39:05 GMT
References: <1991Apr15.021544.19067@umbc3.umbc.edu> <1991Apr15.211355.7919@ukpoit.co.uk>
Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 48

In article <1991Apr15.211355.7919@ukpoit.co.uk> alan@ukpoit.co.uk (Alan Barclay) writes:
>
>Fairly obviously the designers of vi wern't touch typists, for two
>reasons:

Bzzt! Thanks for playing. Wrong, Bill Joy *was* a touch typist at the
time he designed vi. Quite a fast one, at that. He was also the soul
designer; he studied up on emacs, the rand editor, etc, and requested
lots of suggestions, but the resulting design was 100% his decision.

>2) If you're a touch typist then 'u','d','l','r' seems as natural as
>you can get....

This and all the other comments in this thread about what's natural/good/
reasonable for touch typing are spurious. There's no particular reason
to think that there's any such criteria, let alone one that is well or
poorly matched by vi's scheme.

1) The extent to which it's mnemonic has nothing to do with touch typing.
   Mnemonicity is also important only during the learning phase, and Bill
   Joy stated quite clearly in his documentation that vi caters only to
   experts. This sometimes unpopular sentiment is easily justified by
   many studies from CHI literature (basically that systems that cater
   purely to beginners always hinder experts, yet all beginners become
   experts fairly quickly).
2) The argument that the keys should be far apart or on different hands is
   irrelevent, since there's no reason to think that one is rapidly typing
   up->left->down->right etc. When cursor keys are used in quick succession,
   it is inevitably the *same* key that is repeated, so from that point of
   view it matters little which key it is.
3) A dvorak keyboard makes far more of a difference than any possible
   arrangement of editor command keys; editor commands are far less
   frequent overall than text entry.
4) VI already caters to touch typing (as do most editors) by 1) not requiring
   the fingers to leave the touch typing area of the keyboard (i.e. you don't
   *have* to lift your hand and move it to a stupid arrow keypad; function
   keys and other keypads are the ultimate evil for touch typists), and
   2) you need not type CTRL along with the primary key to effect cursor
   control; this caters to touch typing because it's faster to hit one
   key than to coordinate two keystrokes. As someone else noted, it
   also allows one to browse with one hand while drinking coffee with the
   other, which is a not insignificant advantage.

Doug
-- 
--
Doug Merritt		doug@eris.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!eris!doug)
		or	uunet.uu.net!crossck!dougm