Switching to Vim Motions in Cursor Completely Changed How I Navigate Code

Written on 2025-11-22 by Adam Drake - 2 min read

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Are you a software developer? How do you navigate around your code editor? Is it important to you? Do you think it’s important at all? Depending on your answers to these questions will likely dictate your enjoyment of this article. If your answers are leaning towards the affirmative then I encourage you to read on. If not, I still encourage you to read on because maybe I can change your mind. Maybe not but it’s always worth being open minded don’t you think?

I read an article once written by John Linquist (he works on https://egghead.io/ — maybe even created it? Not sure… google it) and he was talking about the way he had updated his keyboard layout to avoid “finger gymnastics” when typing code. I suddenly became very aware of the weird and wonderful contorted movements I was doing with my hands on the keyboard when I was coding.

Holding ‘shift’ whilst twisting my hands and wrist slightly to reach the ‘curly brackets’. Stretching a little more to reach the ‘normal brackets’. Hands jumping all over the keyboard just to write a small function.

There had to be a better way right?

I Was Using My Tools Wrong

I instantly realised I was using my main set of tools — keyboard and code editor (yes and my brain… I get that’s the most important tool but lets not get bogged down in semantics)- in a horribly inefficient way.

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Written by Adam Drake

Adam Drake is a Frontend React Developer who is very passionate about the quality of the web. He lives with his wife and three children in Prague in the Czech Republic.