Colemak keyboards with Emacs or VIM [closed]

Question

I've been crossing things out on my TODO list. I've recently picked up Colemak. Next I wanted to learn Vim or Emacs. I was leaning towards Vim, however one of its benefits are sticking to the home row. With Colemak, the home row has been changed. I realize that I could remap the keys, but assigning the functionality to different letters is not extremely appealing to me (if there is any relation between letters and their function. I know movement is not correlated but I'm not sure on all the rest.)

I don't want to start an argumentative post about text editors, but rather receive comments from Colemak (or Dvorak) users about alternative keymappings and these two editors.

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm a vim+qwerty user (I've tried learning dvorak, but it turns out typing speed is not my rate limiting factor and I don't have RSI issues). Only the hjkl cursor movement keys in vi(m) are position dependent, everything else is mnemonic. I see on the Colemak layout, that h/l are vaguely left/right, but j/k are down/up. Nevertheless, I doubt that would be a significant stumbling block. You could either use the arrow keys instead, or continue to use hjkl and deal with the funny positions.

I wouldn't be inclined to try to remap the vim functions depending on the keyboard layout. That seems like too much potential confusion for me.

Answer 2

Here is a previous post that should help you some. There is some discussion on there, some users don't remap. Some do.

I am going to remap over the weekend actually. I have for the past year used the default mappings, with Dvorak.

Answer 3

I have recently switched to Colemak and I also use Vim as my main editor.

I can tell you that there is no need to remap the movement keys - or any other Vim keys for that matter. Your brain will quickly learn the new positions of the movement keys. For the mnemonic keys there is definitely no need to remap - you want to keep the mnemonic meanings behind the keys.

If you remap the Vim movement keys you will be in the unfortunate position of not being able to operate a vanilla Vim with any real efficiency - for example if you need to SSH to a server. I argue that for most people that will be much more common than having to use someone's computer that does not have Colemak.

As well, there are Vim plugins you may get one day that will clash with your remappings, or you will read a Vim tip one day about a feature which you can't now use because you have remapped things.

It will be a real pain for you, so I wouldn't bother with any remappings.

Answer 4

I'm using a similar set up to Graham (up, down, left, right, is hkjl (Qwerty hnyu)) but instead of using noremap, remap using langmap in my .vimrc:

set langmap=hk,jh,kj

This has the added advantage of changing other commands that use these movement keys (e.g. g, z and C-w) without having to redefine all these commands manually, i.e. C-wh moves up a window, C-wk moves down a window, etc.

Answer 5

This in your .vimrc will change the cursor movement for Colemak without affecting other vim mappings, because it only affects the h/j/k letters.

• up = h (labelled as "h" on the keyboard)
• down = k (labelled as "n" on the keyboard)
• left = j (labelled as "y" on the keyboard)
• right = l (labelled as "u" on the keyboard)

Here is the mapping:

noremap h k
noremap j h
noremap k j

Answer 6

I'm using Ryan Heise's solution for Vim:

I came up with the "NEST" navigation bindings which preserve the physical location of the up/down navigation keys (left/right are different but still on the home row):

N = down E = up S = left T = right

The commands for setting this up are on my Colemak page at the bottom:

http://www.ryanheise.com/colemak/

Mostly, these bindings allow you to use a regular vim cheat sheet to learn the commands, except for navigation of course.

Of the 4 keys assigned in N-E-S-T, the "N" ("n"ext search result) and "E" (move "e"nd of current word) were frequent but gobbled up. I remapped them back to their original QWERTY positions and so they are the only two commands that don't have their original logical names.

Taken from https://forum.colemak.com/topic/50-colemak-vim/p2/#p2514