it's not something awesome either. It's just an evolutionary dead-end; the male nipple of software design.
I disagree. I started out using the cursor keys all the time because they were what I was used to.
It wasn't until I had been using vim for hours every day for well over a year that I came to slowly prefer hjkl - it's not a habit from "the old days"; it's not leftover cruft we'd be better off without; it genuinely is better to use hjkl than the cursor keys.
If you do enough editing to make it worthwhile to build up the muscle memory, that is.
Having said that, I remapped the "up" and "down" cursor keys and I've started using them a lot more since:
noremap <Up> gk
noremap <Down> gj
They now allow me to navigate up & down wrapped lines the more intuitive way of one keypress per visible line, rather than the still-useful vim way of one keypress per actual line.
I disagree. I started out using the cursor keys all the time because they were what I was used to.
It wasn't until I had been using vim for hours every day for well over a year that I came to slowly prefer hjkl - it's not a habit from "the old days"; it's not leftover cruft we'd be better off without; it genuinely is better to use hjkl than the cursor keys.
If you do enough editing to make it worthwhile to build up the muscle memory, that is.
Having said that, I remapped the "up" and "down" cursor keys and I've started using them a lot more since:
noremap <Up> gk noremap <Down> gj
They now allow me to navigate up & down wrapped lines the more intuitive way of one keypress per visible line, rather than the still-useful vim way of one keypress per actual line.
YMMV.
-- The author :)