Basic Movement

Why h j k l instead of arrow keys

Arrow keys live in the corner of the keyboard. Your right hand has to leave the home row, find them, navigate, and come back. h j k l are already under your right hand. The first day they feel awkward; by day three they feel like the arrow keys were a detour.

Vim was designed on the ADM-3A terminal in 1976, whose keyboard had those exact letters labeled with arrow icons. The convention stuck because it's mechanically excellent, not just for historical reasons.

Character movement

h, j, k, l for left, down, up, right. Yes, in that order — j goes down because it has a descender, k goes up because it has an ascender. The whole quest is full of these mnemonic accidents.

Word movement — the first big speed-up

Hopping character-by-character is fine for fine-grained edits, but most of the time you want to jump by words. w jumps to the start of the next word; e jumps to the end of the current (or next) word; b jumps backward to the start of the previous word.

Lowercase versions stop at punctuation: in hello-world they see three words. Uppercase versions (W E B) stop only at whitespace: in the same string they see one WORD. You'll use both constantly.

Line movement

0 jumps to the very start of the line; ^ jumps to the first non-blank character (usually what you actually want); $ jumps to the end. Imagine the keyboard row of numbers: 0 is the leftmost, $ sits over 4 on the right side — visual mnemonics again.

File-scale movement

gg jumps to the first line of the file; G jumps to the last line. :42 jumps to line 42 (so does 42G). Ctrl-d and Ctrl-u scroll half a page down/up; Ctrl-f and Ctrl-b scroll a full page.