Yeah, I let hjkl discipline slide for a long time, too; it's damn hard to interrupt a reflexive reach for the easier to align cluster whose labels actually correspond to what you want to do. Here's the part that finally pushed me over: arrow keys can supplement/mirror/tweak anything you find overly awkward, slow, or hard to remember in the "native" form. And you can remap them straight (no prefixes/modifiers) or build something arbitrarily deep and be certain you won't interfere with any other bindings.
See? the arrow key scan become four more user keys, and they have easy to remember direction/orientation if you need it. Having trouble navigating, swapping, and resizing, your layout (and accidentally hosing text with ^w in the wrong mode? I did, but 20 minutes after seeing someone else use a similar setup, I was using my own variant more comfortably than any console window management bindings I'd ever tried before.
tl;dr; Remap the arrow keys from movement to anything you struggle with normally, and be amazed how you survived before your four newest "user" keys were liberated!
(Also, if anyone wants me to, I'd be happy to post my re-binding config lines as a template/sample.)
See? the arrow key scan become four more user keys, and they have easy to remember direction/orientation if you need it. Having trouble navigating, swapping, and resizing, your layout (and accidentally hosing text with ^w in the wrong mode? I did, but 20 minutes after seeing someone else use a similar setup, I was using my own variant more comfortably than any console window management bindings I'd ever tried before.
tl;dr; Remap the arrow keys from movement to anything you struggle with normally, and be amazed how you survived before your four newest "user" keys were liberated!
(Also, if anyone wants me to, I'd be happy to post my re-binding config lines as a template/sample.)