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 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 2

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.