this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
981 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59197 readers
4055 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The hjkl keys came from Bill Joy when he wrote vi. The terminal he was using had arrows printed on those keys because it didn't have dedicated arrow keys. It was a natural progression to reuse those keys for navigation.
vim was a huge improvement over vi. To where it became the defacto replacement. Some distros even shipped vim as a replacement for vi. That was because the Linux Standard Base required vi to be present.
Still a huge influence. vi was a bit painful to use when coming from vim. Would hjkl have died out if it wasn't for vim? IDK. I think it would have been relegated to a niche corner of the unix/linux world.
That terminal was also responsible for ~ used as home dir in path and ^ as beginning of string in regex.
Wow TIL