I must thank you for this. I'm a fairly recent vim convert with an obsession with configuration (my vimrc is somehow already over 700 lines.. probably because of bad formatting) and yet I still haven't gotten around to doing these simple remappings. Vim with colemak is already pretty nice for the most part. I can't imagine yanking on qwerty, for instance. I've been just using left, down, up, right on a caps layer which really is starting to feel sub-optimal for something so frequently used. I've really thought too much about how I would change things, but I like this the best so far, and you've done it with four of my favourite programs! I think this has motivated me to finally do something about it.

N to k makes sense because it's what the qwerty mapping is and it's not too hard to reach. E to j makes sense because I don't really use e much. What you've done with l is also very cool. The only problem for me is s. It's no problem really for zsh, tmux, and pentadactyl, but I use sneak.vim and have that mapped to s. I'll probably just map that to f since I don't use 1 letter finds that much having sneak.

Anyway, I might build on this if I find anything to be lacking, though I try not to use any control mappings, so I won't add anything there if it's missing. I'll also probably get around to implementing these bindings for things like ranger and the other vi-like programs eventually as well.

General observation, and critique of the pentadactyl bindings: I think one should avoid trying to have the same bindings for vim as for zathura/vimium/pentadactyl, ranger, etc, as they have very different usecases. 

For a browser or pdf reader, the most common action, by far, will be to "page up/down" (with one-step scrolling reserved for small adjustments).  Those needs to be assigned to the easiest keys (n/e rather than N/E, or, in my case, n/u, since I feel more comfortable stretching my middle finger to the top row). 

Because browsers/readers have no major functions, there is also plenty of space to assign your lesser-used actions without using modified or chained keys.  For example, <Up>, <Down> could be assigned next to n/u, rather than as a shifted N/U.

Much more importantly, though, an action as common as switching tabs should not be relegated to C- keys, gt, or worse, gT.  I've assigned mine to h/o, respectively.

Ranger is a tougher case, since it uses a lot of keys you want to avoid displacing, but I've noticed that all of the directional arrows become about as important when navigating the folders.  Because of that, I would argue that vim-like navigation (which always implicitly depreciated the h in favor of jk) doesn't make sense there at all.  Instead, I would suggest unei (qwerty ijkl) navigation, despite it breaking a few things.

For comparison, here are my own mappings: https://github.com/lalopmak/lalopmak-mappings

I disagree that you should be using w,e,b and /. They are pretty inefficient. If you need to go five lines down, 5j is much faster than searching. That combined with just f can be faster than /.

Moving through a line with w e and b is often pretty painful (especially if you use vim for writing like me and act as if a line is a paragraph). You have to count the words or hit them repeatedly (which is inefficient). Even better than easy motion is to use sneak. It's a two letter multi-line find that can basically get you anywhere in 3-4 keypresses max. With the default mapping, all you have to do is type s[two letters of the place you're looking at] and it will automatically jump to the next match. If it's not the match you want, you can use easy motion like highlighting to get to where you want to go usually in a single keystroke (because there are much less results for a two letter find).

Also, I've found it useful to map jk/ne/up and down to gk and gj when dealing with long wrapped lines. Sneak deals with those perfectly though.

Maybe remapping hnei exactly to what they are in vim isn't a good idea, but I think it's generally a good thing to draw parallels. For example, for window management, I have hnei set to select windows and HNEI set to move windows based on direction.

I use hjkl/ left right up down (mostly h and l ; the opposite of vim) for maybe 30% of my navigation with ranger. 30% is marks, and then the other 30% is using smart case f. I don't really see the reason not to change hnei to left down up right.

For page up and down and similar things, I have them easily accessible on a layer, so there's no need for remapping.

I agree about gt. I never use gt in vim or when browsing or ever. In vim I have space + home row letters bound to gt#. With this, any tab can be accessed in two keystrokes (I don't really go far above 10 tabs and mostly work with buffer switching). I'm also using Unite and taboo.vim which combined allows me to set specific bookmark files for tabs based on their name (i.e. the same binding would open the config bookmark file in the config tab and the notes bookmark file in the notes tab ; from here, with quick match, all shown buffers can be accessed in a single keystroke). This allows access to 100+ files in 2-5 keystrokes max (and that number can be reduced further if you want to use modifiers). Throw in another 2 keystrokes and you have access to 1000+ files all in a very organized manner with only the memorization of 3 keybindings required.

Yes, agreed.

I was actually talking about in a pdf viewer, but I don't really use pdfs that often anyway. For browsing, it might be better to remap them, but using "s" as a modifier key doesn't really take that much effort (which is what I've started doing.. caps is pretty easy too).

30% was for all hnei, and i is by far the most frequently used. Thinking about it now, it might be more like 80% between marks and f, and i can also be replaced by enter. I really don't go backwards a lot, so n might be used more than h. Regardless, I really can't think of anything I would want to remap to hnei; I like them as the arrow keys. I'm not quite sure what you are suggesting.

For me, part of the beauty of the Extend mappings is how they take less *mental* effort! Yes, I do have to press down the Caps key a lot and with my little pinky to boot – but that's become second nature to me now. Sounds odd, but it's easier to press than any of the other modifiers. And the big benefit as mentioned, is that all the nav and edit stuff is on that layer and not spread around in different places for different apps. So that feels very effortless to me at least. Ymmv.

The difference between that and the alternative is unnoticeable to me. I agree that it would be slightly better for me remap page up and down specifically, but I use the keys so infrequently and my current setup takes so little effort already compared to actually moving the hand to reach page up and down, that I haven't bothered to take the time to do it.

I think it's a matter of preference. There's no program that I use arrow keys/directional movement intensively, and I just prefer them all lined up. Also U is an important key usually (undo).

set number
set rnu

I can understand why you wouldn't want to do this, but for me, this covers anything in view, and doesn't require thinking. I usually only jump by lines when deleting lines. If I'm not going anywhere specific on the line this is much faster than /. I've tried both. It doesn't require counting, only vision. Using / is significantly more keypresses, requires just as much looking, and I don't like jump/highlight search. Again, if you want to search instead, vim-sneak is faster than /. I still can't recommend it highly enough.

Sneak is faster than e,w,c, and b for anything that is not in very close proximity to where you are. You complain about counting, but these require counting for anything more than a few words away, and using them in succession (i.e. "wwww") is inefficient. I won't argue that they work a lot better than hjkl, but for me there's not a huge difference between how much I use them.

I've recently started looking into cool things like simulating layers and layer locks as well as using normal keys as modifiers. For example, I can still use caps, but If I don't need all of the stuff on the left side (which is often the case), I'll use "s" as a modifier to tap into the extend layer instead. It works okay on my mechanical keyboard, but it's not perfect. I think it's a cool idea that might be useful in the future though.

Angelic_sedition: no problem! I hope it helps to at least inspire your own flavor of Vim mappings. Also, I actually do have n/e mapped to gj/gk in my vimrc :) I just made it more true to the defaults for the forum post. I'm going to have to investigate some of the plugins you mention.

Lalop: I think that one of the reasons I like my mappings so much is that they're very similar across programs. I can see how different mappings for different programs can be good. I used to have more different bindings per program, but there was a small amount of context switching my mind had to do, and I just prefer to remove that entirely and have consistent mappings across the board. I could certainly make things more efficient, but that's not where my priority with this is I guess.

Vaskozl: thanks for the wisdom, hehe. Yus, it sounds like my mappings aren't for you! Of course text navigation rarely uses arrow keys. But window, tab, and related things do, so arrows are vitally important to me. I am constantly moving between panes and tabs in Vim and Tmux and Firefox, and it's really nice for me to have a consistent, prioritized experience with that. I used to have my Pentadactyl h,i and n,e to be switching tabs and large scroll up/down, but wound up preferring everything as consistent as possible. It's interesting - your use of C-u and C-d to make it consistent with less's u and d is almost opposite of mine - I use f and b in less to make it consistent with Vim's C-f and C-b :) I've not heard of ranger before...a file manager...I have been satisfied with dealing with files in shell, I never thought to look for something like this. I'm going to have to look into what it offers.

Funny...I've been using ctrl+arrows for tabbing for so long, I didn't even know that gt switched tabs :-P

I was struggling to figure out what you meant in your second paragraph, then realized you were referring to my Pentadactyl bindings! I actually meant I tried tabbing and long scrolling with lowercase, hi and ne, not upper HI and NE like I originally typed :-P

Either way, you clearly have different ideas and preferences. Everyone will. I present all this not to say "this is the best way." I have no interest in defending it as such. I would much rather say "this is a way I'm doing it!" and hope that it inspires or helps other people out who might like standard home-row arrows.

I'm saying that I don't need what I have on the caps layer around s that often. It's still easy to press arst together (for any wanted modifiers), but caps xcv for example, is hard to reach from s.

I use all the left hand side letters. I don't use all the mappings for the extend layer on the left side frequently.

I've had the most success doing this on Windows (I used to use touchcursor, for example, which used the space bar as the modifier for a while... I remember it working pretty well). What I've tried out on linux is a few programs (mainly xcape and keydouble; both work with xmodmap). Xcape claims to be able to do this, but it does not have a minimum time set up that the key must be held before it will work as a modifier resulting in a lot of wrong keystrokes (i.e up down or whatever is on your layer). I've opened up an issue about it on the github, and maybe the feature will be implemented in the future: xcape. Based on the response so far, I doubt it though.

Edit: The issue I opened has been closed. One of the examples of use has been removed, and for the other it has been clarified that the example does not actually work, so it would seem there is no hope from getting this functionality from xcape in the future :(.

The main point of xcape is to be able to set up modifiers to send things like escape on release (which is what a lot of people do with ctrl mapped to caps to send escape for vim) which works great. This can be done easily enough just for vim just by "inoremap <c> Escape" though. Using normal letters as modifiers is the really interesting thing to me. I don't know if vim has a <> for modeswitch though, so xcape works great in addition to a caps layer for escape.. or backspace or whatever.

Mostly autoscroll down, gg, G, and something I have mapped to 5j I think. I mostly do reading. Maybe not the best way, but I haven't suffered in speed or anything because of it. Page up and down have been screwy for me with firefox(/pentadactyl). Very jarring. I'll get to it eventually maybe.

I know. I was saying that using caps or s as a modifier takes hardly any effort compared to moving the hand, and the gap in effort between that and having it actually mapped is very small for me. I shall go home and reevaluate my life/mappings though. I'm a pretty new convert to pentadactyl.

Just to be clear, by pgup/down, I just mean "scroll up/down by a large preferred amount".  It could be 10j/k, for example.  Whatever's most comfortable while browsing.  Just not usually 1j/k unless you really like pressing that button a lot.