Vim controls are a certain mode of thinking & no offense meant, but it sounds like you haven't delved too deeply into them. The complexities come when you star

Vim controls are a certain mode of thinking & no offense meant, but it sounds like you haven't delved too deeply into them. The complexities come when you start to recognize that there are motions and operators and that these can be composed. That you are thinking about arrows means you're not really at that level yet. First step is to not use arrows any more, especially while in insert mode. Put this in your .vimrc (or jet brains equiv): inoremap <left> nop inoremap <right> nop inoremap <up> nop inoremap <down> nop Insert mode arrows destroy vim brain. Then, once rid of these broken "training"-wheels learn some of the more advanced motions and operators. https://vim-adventures.com https://vim-adventures.com is fun. The emacs/readline shortcuts are nice in MacOS text fields and in the command line, but there are only a handful I use regularly (^A, ^E, ^K, ^U, ^L). I would use vim-bindings in the shell, but I haven't found a good way to indicate my current mode, so I get confused & don't like it.