Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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400
· xaph

Moving with h,j,k,l when in insert mode

I'm a big fan of vim and started to use h,j,k,l to navigate on code instead of arrows. Not moving your hand from home zone to arrows is very healthy and I was upset when in insert mode. Insert mode requires arrows to navigate and it feels so wrong to escape and insert again if I want to edit upper line.

After some investigation I added these configs to my vimrc:

imap <C-h> <C-o>h
imap <C-j> <C-o>j
imap <C-k> <C-o>k
imap <C-l> <C-o>l

Now, I can use ctrl + h, ctrl+j, ctrl+k, ctrl+l to navigate in insert mode.

2 Responses
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this is very bad smell, to move around in INS mode. Whole concept of vim to do all motions in normal mode, and think about text as an objects: char, word, sentence, paragraph, block..

over 1 year ago ·

I agree with you but I really hate swapping modes when I write something wrong.

over 1 year ago ·