Improving jump labels for faster navigation

[oxcrow]

Currently jump labels are created in an alphabetical order, as in "aa", "ab" "ac" etc.

This is slow to type because of the following reasons:

• Both keys generally need to be pressed by the same hand. Thus our fingers need to travel farther than they need to.
• Since the labels are alphabetical the labels closest to our cursor becomes "aa", "ab", "ac" etc. Typing "a" is slower because we need to use the pinky finger on our non-dominant hand, which is weak. It also leads to higher fatigue and cramps our hands.

We can improve this by selecting label keys that follow these principles.

• They should be typed using both hands because typing with both hands is faster. Example use "fk" instead of "aa" as labels.
• They should be near the home row (i.e near f, g, h, k, l etc) and remain within the center of the keyboard. The central keys are easier to reach for our fingers and less fatiguing.
• Use keys together only when they are distinctly visible such as "ek" instead of "il"

Thanks.

[oxcrow]

Here is a visual example to explain the idea.

I use a plugin in Firefox called "Vimium" that allows us to browse using vim motions.

One such feature is obviously the "go to link" feature that is activated by pressing f.

The yellow characters that you see are now labels and if i press them the underlying link will be clicked.

As seen here, notice how their labels are created in a way to follow the principles that I mentioned above.

One thing that they do better is amortize the cost of fatigue by mixing the easier to press and harder to press labels so it is roughly equivalent to jump to anywhere on the screen.

[tpm-cd]

Maybe tweaking the config option jump-label-alphabet at https://docs.helix-editor.com/editor.html#editor-section ?

[oxcrow]

Thank you!

This worked perfectly!

I will have to tweak the alphabet order little bit, but the results are promising.

[halbuer]

Probably not exactly what you want, but I tweaked the label generation in that way, that it prefers the the leading characters for label generation. So instead of "aa", "ab", "ac", "ad", "ae", "af",... it now generates "aa", "ab", "ba", "bb", "ca", "cb", "ac", ...
So if you use the jump-label-alphabet config option to specify a custom alphabet starting with the most accessible keys (home row, upper row, ...) you get well accessible labels for close jumps. I use it to also extend the alphabet with upper case chars, which are only used if the lower case chars are not sufficient, e.g. for large tex files.

If your are interested, I can publish my changes and try to get them upstream.

[halbuer]

See #13760