Here is a message from his family

  • grte@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    67
    ·
    1 year ago

    Pretty much any program I use I try to shift over to vim style keys. This guy’s reach went far beyond vim to me.

    • DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      52
      ·
      1 year ago

      The hjkl keys came from Bill Joy when he wrote vi. The terminal he was using had arrows printed on those keys because it didn’t have dedicated arrow keys. It was a natural progression to reuse those keys for navigation.

      vim was a huge improvement over vi. To where it became the defacto replacement. Some distros even shipped vim as a replacement for vi. That was because the Linux Standard Base required vi to be present.

      Still a huge influence. vi was a bit painful to use when coming from vim. Would hjkl have died out if it wasn’t for vim? IDK. I think it would have been relegated to a niche corner of the unix/linux world.