Yeah, that's the advice I'd give to people starting out in Emacs too. I didn't use it but somehow got the hang of navigating around with the keyboard anyhow. It's probably because I personally did not use the arrow keys before switching to Emacs--I usually used the mouse.
A bunch of people I know do use the arrow keys to move around, and it's quite a loss. You don't gain that much just by being on the home row, of course, but there is some gain. However, the real win comes when you start using higher-level movement commands and moving by word/line/paragraph/expression/whatever. People used to the arrow keys will not be able to take advantage of these nice commands nearly as easily.
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Yeah, that's the advice I'd give to people starting out in Emacs too. I didn't use it but somehow got the hang of navigating around with the keyboard anyhow. It's probably because I personally did not use the arrow keys before switching to Emacs--I usually used the mouse.
A bunch of people I know do use the arrow keys to move around, and it's quite a loss. You don't gain that much just by being on the home row, of course, but there is some gain. However, the real win comes when you start using higher-level movement commands and moving by word/line/paragraph/expression/whatever. People used to the arrow keys will not be able to take advantage of these nice commands nearly as easily.