I've been using vim for 20 years and never knew about this. It's a life changer! (I should have looked it up ages ago...)
There are a lot of us dinos out there who haven't even used hjkl to navigate. All I do is yy, dd, p, ctrl-v to rectangle select, shift-v to line select, g or G to navigate c and the occasional s/^/#
> hjkl
These movement keys are at least 40% the reason I love and use vim or vim plugins. Not having to move my hand, and being able to “drive” with only one hand are immensely beneficial.
With cursor keys, it feels like half of my editing time is spent finding the arrow keys and then finding the home typing position.
Emacs ctrl n/p/f/b are better than cursor keys often, but they require two hands.
C-f, C-e, C-b, C-a only require one hand. But I see your point.
The best part of evil-mode in Emacs is that I get to use Emacs bindings in insert mode, and then vim keys in normal mode. For instance when writing function signatures, I can hit C-f to easily jump over the closing parenthesis, or C-e to easily jump to the end of line, usually also to skip the closing parenthesis. I'm not sure how you would do that in vim without exiting back into normal mode and using for instance S-a to append at the end of the line.