I'm not trying to be difficult here, just genuinely curious: why disable the arrow keys? Is it simply the speed boost you get from using hjkl on the home row vs moving your hand to the arrows?
I use Colemak, so hjkl is very counter-intuitive for me, whereas the arrow keys make sense and aren't /that/ far away.
EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684515 has some good explanations. So does anyone have suggestions for non-QWERTY users? remap the keys that are in the HJKL space, leading to a cascade of keys moved around? Deal with the counter-intuitiveness of actually using HJKL?
When I use Vim I barely even use hkjl except to fine-tune larger movement commands. I'll search for a symbol, or move word-by-word, or use f/F/t/T to move to a different character on a line, which gets me in the ballpark.
Even if hjkl is faster, I would be optimising for a case that just doesn't show up that much.
Dvorak users can get away with using hjkl with the dvorak layout - it's not that counter-intuitive. Your Colemak layout, however, looks beyond salvageable in terms of using Colemak hjkl. I think a re-binding is in order there.
Or, remap the hjkl of vim, a ridiculous legacy of an obsolete keyboard Bill Joy just happened to be using at the time, to the normal inverted-T of cursor movement: ijkl. Then continue using the "arrowkeys" that are now under your right hand on the home row.
You'll then need to move the insert on left side of cursor, which was i, to h, the key on the left side of your index finger. Reach left to insert left. Easy for muscle memory. With that, both sets of arrowkeys on the keyboard work the same, and you won't need to disable one of them. Normal arrowkey muscle memory, and reach left to insert left. So easy.
Bill Joy was working in an era when keyboards didn't have separate arrowkeys and the ESC key was within easy reach. He wanted it to be as easy as possible to remember lots of different command keys. He used what was printed on his key caps, such as a straight line of arrows on hjkl and various English words such as "yank" in his design. It was a good idea at the time. He also realized that keyboards varied, so he made it all remappable to adapt to future keyboard designs--also a good idea.
But the programmers themselves couldn't adapt. The choices Joy made for that obsolete keyboard were frozen in amber by programmers whose habits were frozen in amber. These days, almost all keyboards have real arrowkeys, and people develop the muscle memory to use them long before they ever hear of vim. Also the ESC key, such a fundamental key, is off in Siberia.
For every vim user with vim habits based on an obsolete keyboard they don't use, there are 10,000 potential vim users with keyboarding habits based on the modern keyboards they DO use. Those 10,000 people use inverted-T arrowkeys, x/c/v as cut, copy, paste, they can't reach their ESC key, etc. Vim was designed to adapt, but old vimmers apparently weren't, so the design features that give vim its power are forever stuck behind arbitrary key layouts optimized for the wrong keyboard.
It makes more sense to remain consistent with existing muscle memory and keyboards, using the inverted-T arrangement ijkl, mapping your left-side insert to the left side key ('h'), and mapping ESC to something easy to reach, such as ';;'. Then, if you ever need to use a non-customized vim, just use the real arrowkeys, which will still feel natural. If you ever need to use another app with a serious vi mode, like zsh, it will be remappable to match your vi. (If it's not a serious vi mode but just a couple of vi-like keyboard shortcuts, either use the arrowkeys or do what we always do, given that every app has its own unique set of keyboard shortcuts: just learn a few new shortcuts for that app.)
What's so ridiculous about hjkl? I'm actually an emacs user, and I've gone to great lengths to set up hjkl layouts in my editor and browser.
It seems like the perfect setup to me. An inverted T would cause you to reposition a finger every time you wanted to change direction. I do that often enough that it doesn't seem very efficient to me. I had some doubts as to whether jkl; would be a better option, but it really does seem more convenient to have the "down" key below your index finger.
