Breaking bad habits

| Computers and stuff

A most disturbing Vim anti-pattern is using the good old arrow keys to navigate around the page. I've been told that this is a terrible habit which makes me more inefficient. I do not like wasting time and being inefficient, so I read up a bit on the subject and decided to add the following lines to my .vimrc configuration file. Say good-bye to arrow keys my friend.

noremap <Up> <NOP>
noremap <Down> <NOP>
noremap <Left> <NOP>
noremap <Right> <NOP>

At first I felt very crippled, but after awhile believe it or not I started to get used to it. Bad habits are hard to break, but if you hang in there you can do it. j,j,l,k,k,k,h,k,j ...

Even using the default vim navigation keys h,j,k,l gets boring after awhile. This is the slow poke way to move like a snail across the editing surface. There are even speedier and thus better ways to accomplish such a feat. If you don't know what they are look it up yourself (:help word).

So in order to end the pain of all pains I extended vim nops to include the following lines as well:

noremap h <NOP>
noremap j <NOP>
noremap k <NOP>
noremap l <NOP>

Slowly but surely I'm on my way to becoming a true blue vim guru, and it feels pretty good. You're never too old to learn new tricks, and if by doing so you become more productive so much the better I'd say.

Alright then, let me help you along by giving you a slight hint. The w, b, e, ge commands allow us to move forward or backward to the start or end of a word. The W, B, E, gE commands are also something you should check into. Much quicker jumping around that's for sure.

You might also want to have a look at Habit breaking, habit making and then install the Hard Mode Vim Plugin like I did.

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Information

This personal weblog was started way back on July 21, 2001 which means that it is 7-21-2001 old.

So far this blog contains no less than 2498 entries and as many as 1877 comments.

Important events

Graduated from Stanford 6-5-1979 ago.

Kiffin Rockwell was shot down and killed 9-23-1916 ago.

Believe it or not but I am 10-11-1957 young.

First met Thea in Balestrand, Norway 6-14-1980 ago.

Began well-balanced and healthy life style 1-8-2013 ago.

My father passed away 10-20-2000 ago.

My mother passed away 3-27-2018 ago.

Started Gishtech 04-25-2016 ago.