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In vim wouldn’t you just remap everything so that the physical keys stay the same in normal mode, and only use an alternative layout in insert mode?


There's too much cognitive overhead if you do this. For example, to change a word we use `ciw`, which roughly means "Change Inner Word" as a mnemonic. There are quite a lot of similar keys with mnemonics, which would prolly make no sense if you keep the QWERTY keypresses on a Dvorak layout.


I find such mnemonics only useful for initially learning how vim works. After a while it's all just muscle memory and I don't even think about how to do stuff, I just do it.


I was at that point several times (using Neo2).

The problem is that there is too much to remap, basically you need every letter on the keyboard. And if you keep positions, mnemonics do not make sense anymore. "Change Inner Word" would become "JC," (on Dvorak).

If you keep the letters (instead of the positions) all commands in muscle memory do not work anymore. I tried to relearn those ... but in the end it is too much effort for too little gain.

These days, whenever I get fancy I just switch the keyboard layout to Neo2 when writing longer texts and switch back when going back to command mode. (I guess there is a way to automate that switch, that would be interesting now that I think of it).




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