I would counter that with computer gaming. Everyone who plays computer games growing up would be familiar with the keypad, the arrow keys, or WASD. In all cases, UP is always above DOWN.
For this demographic, HJKL is just wrong.
Computer gamers are also proficient in controlling a keyboard and a mouse at the same time, so the home row argument does not apply.
Oh I agree it's not for everyone. I'm just saying what might be the reason from a historical perspective.
Gamers are proficient in their niche; game playing. However if the job is to hammer out 400 lines of code or a manual, I'd back an expert touch-typist proficient with Vim over a gamer every time.
It's difficult to explain; the kind of people I'm talking about are experts in not just typing; they are super-proficient in coding as well. They have the text in their head, they just want to feed it to the computer in the shortest time possible. I've sat and watched an Unix guru create a program from scratch with Vi - it's a marvel, it's quite like watching an expert race car driver, if you're into that sort of thing.
True, but somehow I am more willing to rebind undo than insert; I am not sure this is logical. I also do like the h,ctrl-h and j,ctrl-j correspondences I mentioned - helps me remember the values in question when working with ascii (ctrl-a = 1, ctrl-b = 2, etc).
Of course, already having muscle memory for hjkl from vim, robots, hack, &c, I'm not rebinding anything standard - I find it valuable to be sufficiently at home on any system I am I find myself working on.
For this demographic, HJKL is just wrong.
Computer gamers are also proficient in controlling a keyboard and a mouse at the same time, so the home row argument does not apply.