For what it's worth, I remapped vim's navigation keys from the awkward hjkl to the normal inverted-T arrangement i,j,k,l. Then I remapped the inserts, i & I, to h & H.

With that, my natural finger movement on the arrowkeys and on the vim home row match each other.

The reason vim's navigation keys (hjkl) today are arranged the way they are, left-means-down and right-means-up instead of up-means-up and down-means-down, is among the dumbest reasons there can be. Decades ago, the keyboard Bill Joy happened to be using when he wrote vi just happened to have arrows printed on the keycaps of the hjkl keys. He was trying to think of ways to make memorizing lots of commands easier, so he decided to take advantage of what was printed on those keycaps. There were no arrowkeys on that keyboard. That, in itself, was not a dumb choice, because it would have been a useful mnemonic on his own keyboard and he'd probably never seen an inverted-T set of arrowkeys, which didn't become popular until years later.

The dumb part is the insistence on maintaining this onion in the varnish as sacrosanct decades after that silly keyboard disappeared and in an era where every new vim user is accustomed to using the inverted-T arrowkeys found on virtually every keyboard. Anyone who, for some reason, hasn't ever used his arrowkeys picks it up immediately: up-down-left-right mean up-down-left-right. Got it.

That's why so many people who want to use vim have to be "broken" of the habit of using the arrowkeys and forced to learn an additional, weird arrowkey arrangement, because ("trust us") using the home keys is better.

Well, using the home keys is better, but not because of the awkward arrangement. That part is worse. It's better because that's where your fingers rest normally on the keyboard, from where you can operate the full set of vi commands and enjoy its full power.

You can have both. It wouldn't take much convincing to wean people off the arrowkeys if both sets of "arrow keys" on their keyboard had the same natural arrangement they've been used to for years.

I was worried when I abandoned the onion that it would handicap me on plain-vanilla installations of vi/vim until I realized that, these days, yes, there are two sets of arrowkeys on every keyboard, and I can use the real arrowkeys if I have to work on a version of vi/vim without my .vimrc, because they're arranged just like my ijkl. I can live with using the real arrowkeys for a while, and if I'm staying longer, I'll "curl -O mydomain.com/myvimrc" and restart vim with my full customizations and go back to the home row. (I also have my zsh in vi mode, and my .zshrc remaps keys the same way and can also be fetched using curl.)

I fully understand that changing this fundamental arrangement is NOT attractive to experienced vim users, because muscle memory has long since automatized the arrangement. The old fogey's vociferously defend the old onions for various, mostly self-serving, reasons.

(They tell me, for example, that this will make it impossible to use a vim on a different machine on the same page where they brag about their extensive and brilliant .vimrc customizations that they "couldn't live without." Hmm.)

But I'm starting to teach my kids to use terminals, command lines, and editors, and I didn't want to pass this onion on to their generation. I remapped the keys and retaught myself to make it easier for them. Now we can share the same .vimrc and .zshrc. They'll have one, consistent set of muscle habits for arrowkey motion from the start, whether playing games, editing text, or on the zsh command line.