hjkl Walked Out of the Editor

In Herdr, you move between panes with h j k l. If you use Vim, your fingers already know the way. But Herdr is not Vim.

Those four keys quietly became a shared language among terminal tools. Read a manual with man and j and k move you a line at a time. The pager you skim long files with does the same. Most tools that show you a list accept j and k alongside the arrow keys. The reason is plain: the people building those tools used vi and its descendant Vim, and they put the shape their own fingers knew into their own tools. Enough of that piled up to look like a standard.

Keys from one editor left the editor and became something fingers share.