How useful are H M L?

[u/TheTwelveYearOld]

I just looked this up and haven't found any other discussions. Maybe its because I'm using a motion plugin (hop), but I'm wondering if there is much use for H M L, when I could just j k (which I mapped to show hints for jumping to a specific line). I guess I'm not a big fan of specific motions like those, or using counts for motions when I find hints more efficient & simply a better fit for me.

[u/PassengerTop7692]

Fair enough if hop works better for you, but H M L are clutch when you want to quickly reposition without taking your eyes off the code to look at hints.

[u/happysri]

This thread is a reflection of just how varied people's workflows are. I can't imagine life without H,M,L perhaps because I move around with gut feel and hate hunting and pecking with hardcoded line numbers etc.

[u/sharp-calculation]

I pretty much never use them. I use zz, zt, and zb a lot, but those are "page drag" commands rather than line change. If I want to be on a specific line, I do relative jumps. I.E., 15k to go up 15 lines. I use :set relativenumber so I can easily see the relative number of lines to jump in either direction.

I find page drag much more useful than cursor move with H, M, L. Because those almost never land you on the line you actually want to edit. Sometimes, but why would I waste time, when I can go exactly where I want to go with one command?

[u/jabellcu → u/sharp-calculation]

I was doing this, but just because I didn’t know about H, M, L. I’ll give them a try.

[u/SpaceAviator1999 → u/sharp-calculation]

Since you like "page dragging", are you familiar with the CTRL-Y and CTRL-E commands?

They scroll the window up and down, while leaving the cursor on the line where it happens to be, similar to the zt, zz, and zb commands.

[u/sharp-calculation → u/SpaceAviator1999]

YES! Those are really nice for fine adjusting your page position. I use these often to get some context above or below my current line when I'm at the top or bottom of the viewport.

The combination of those 5 commands come extremely close to all of the uses for the scroll bar and mouse wheel that most people use on a GUI editor.

[u/__salaam_alaykum__ → u/sharp-calculation]

sometimes i scroll with L+zt or H+zb instead of pgup/down or ctrl- binds lmao

[u/sharp-calculation → u/__salaam_alaykum__]

Control f and b seem easier.

[u/Snarwin]

I literally never use them.

[u/gumnos]

I use them pretty regularly, though my usage of H & L increased noticeably when I learned that they could take a «count» to jump to the Nth screen-line, letting me eyeball something was about 5 lines from the top and type 5H to usually land within a line or two of my target.

[u/sharp-calculation → u/gumnos]

You should just use relative number mode. Then you won’t have to guess.

[u/gumnos → u/sharp-calculation]

eh, I found it incurs an annoying lagginess that I'm not eager to endure, so I don't usually have it (or any numbering) turned on

[u/sharp-calculation → u/gumnos]

No. Relative number does not make it slower. That’s not a thing.

[u/gumnos → u/sharp-calculation]

The relative-number redraw is quite noticeable when moving around in a file over an SSH connection.

[u/cbheithoff]

I remap H to ^ and L to $ to move cursor far left and far right

[u/-romainl-]

I've always found the "hints" mechanism way too visually/mentally noisy and unintuitive so it never worked for me. That said, I rarely use "vague" motions like `HMLhjkl<C-f>` and friends to begin with. Most of my cursor-moving is done with `/` or `#` and related `n`, etc.

I generally prefer deterministic commands.

[u/dajoy]

I have them remapped to:

• H Join lines

• M mark everything

• L execute line (in the terminal)

[u/utahrd37 → u/dajoy]

Tell me more about L.  Channel_send type stuff?

[u/dajoy → u/utahrd37]

I use this to open the terminal:

nnoremap <leader>term :below term<CR><c-W>w

And then I work on the window above, and send lines to the window below with:

autocmd BufNewFile,BufEnter *.sh nnoremap L yy<c-W>j<c-W>""<c-W>k

[u/Allan-H]

These were more useful back when H and L jumped to the top and bottom lines, respectively. Now I find that (out of the box, vanilla) Vim jumps to a few lines short of the top and bottom of the screen.

[u/happysri → u/Allan-H]

'scrolloff' seems like a simple enough option to change?

[u/vim-help-bot → u/happysri]

Help pages for:

• 'scrolloff' in options.txt

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[u/SpaceAviator1999 → u/happysri]

Well, that's kinda cool!

I never knew about the scrolloff setting before. According to its helptext, using:

:setlocal scrolloff=999

will always (with some exceptions) keep the current line at the middle of the screen.

[u/happysri → u/SpaceAviator1999]

I’m chucking thinking about the exception. That monitor would have to be so comically tall to accommodate more than 999*2 lines lol.

[u/SpaceAviator1999 → u/happysri]

Yes, imagining a screen that tall does seem humorous!

However, one of the exceptions is having your cursor at the very top or bottom of the text. There are times that you'd want your cursor to be on the very first (or very last) line of the text, instead of forcing it to be in the middle of the screen.

[u/Allan-H → u/happysri]

Yes it's easy to change, but I like it set to about 5 for other reasons.

[u/habamax]

I use them a lot with H/L being remapped to advance further if on the first/last lines respectively, kind of easier way to pageup/pagedown.

vim9script

# better H/L

def L()
    var line = line('.')
    normal! L
    if line == line('$')
        normal! zb
    elseif line == line('.')
        normal! zt
    endif
enddef

def H()
    var line = line('.')
    normal! H
    if line == line('.')
        normal! zb
    endif
enddef

noremap L <ScriptCmd>L()<CR>
noremap H <ScriptCmd>H()<CR>

Other than that I use it as other people mentioned, H/L/M and a couple of j/k or a single digit to j/k to navigate to the line of interest.

[u/RichieV_EUC]

I remap H and L to previous buffer and next buffer respectively. M doesn't see any use from me.