Is there a reason some of VIM's motion commands are restricted to one line?

Question

I'm beginning to learn VIM (I've downloaded an emulator plugin for my IDE) and unsurprisingly it's making me irritated and extremely slow. That is all fine and I realize it's a phaze everyone goes through.

However this one feature is quite frustrating - being unable to jump to the next line via l, previous with h or search more than one line with f.

Is there a valid, typing speed enhancing reason for this?

Answer 1

You can make h and l wrap lines by adding h and l to the whichwrap option (:he whichwrap), although for the sake of compatibility with scripts and macros that don't expect h and l to wrap, you might want to avoid adding them, and add the < and > options instead (which allow the left and right arrow keys to wrap).

As for f (and F and t and T), they're just really not meant to do that, but you can use / and ? as movements -- d/foo<Enter> to delete everything between here and a following "foo" (whether it's on this line or a later one).