I use Vim. I started using Vim when I decided to study computer science at university. I borrowed a book from the University library (something about Unix) and there was this whole thing about vi and modes and the terminal. It was a gruelling experience. I only ever recommend Vim to people that spend hours a day coding or otherwise editing markup or plain-text.

I also use Vimperator (Vim-like interface to Firefox) and many other programs that share some keybindings with Vim. The most commonly shared keys are the “arrows”: h, j, k, l.

What with all this use of h, j, k, l, I started shifting the resting position of my hands on my keyboard. Specifically, I moved my right-hand one letter to the left; my home keys became asdf-hjkl. This was annoying though because important keys such as backslash and enter become less accessible.

So I decided to remap my keyboard:

• j becomes h,
• k becomes j,
• l becomes k,
• semicolon becomes l, and to close the loop
• h becomes semicolon

With this, the home-keys (physical keys jkl-semicolon) are the same as the Vim movement keys (hjkl). One last tweak was to swap the shift behaviour of semicolon. So in fact: h becomes colon and shift+h becomes semicolon. This is only worth it because I generally use a programming language with few semicolons: Ocaml.

To implement this, I have a modified xkb file to include the following lines:

key <AC05> {
    type= "ALPHABETIC",
    symbols[Group1]= [          g,         G ]
};
key <AC06> {         [      colon, semicolon ] };
key <AC07> {
    type= "ALPHABETIC",
    symbols[Group1]= [          h,         H ]
};
key <AC08> {
    type= "ALPHABETIC",
    symbols[Group1]= [          j,         J ]
};
key <AC09> {
    type= "ALPHABETIC",
    symbols[Group1]= [          k,         K ]
};
key <AC10> {
    type= "ALPHABETIC",
    symbols[Group1]= [          l,         L ]
};
key <AC11> {         [ apostrophe,  quotedbl ] };

and my .xinitrc executes xkbcomp $HOME/.xkb.hjkl $DISPLAY.

In addition, to make it work outside of X11, I have a /etc/vconsole.conf which contains the line KEYMAP="hjklus". This points to the file /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/hjklus.map.gz which is a modified version of /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.map.gz.

You can find all the files in my configuration repository.