Vim Motions

Vim Motions let you move the text cursor with the H J K L keys instead of reaching for the arrow keys — so your hands stay on the home row while you edit. Hold the Hyper Key, tap one of those four keys, and the cursor moves left, down, up or right. Turn on word motions as well and W / B jump the cursor forward or back a whole word at a time.

What are Vim motions?

Vim is a much-loved text editor with a famous trick: instead of the arrow keys, you move the cursor with four letters right under your fingers — H for left, J for down, K for up and L for right. Because those keys sit on the home row (where your fingers naturally rest), you never have to move your hand to the corner of the keyboard just to nudge the cursor. People who get used to it find it faster and more comfortable.

Uncapped brings that same muscle memory to your whole Mac, not just to Vim. With this feature on, holding the Hyper Key turns H J K L into the arrow keys in any app — a text field in your browser, a note, an email, anywhere you’d normally press an arrow.

For the technically curious. The hjkl layout isn’t arbitrary. Bill Joy wrote the original vi (Vim’s ancestor) in the 1970s on a Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal — a keyboard that had no dedicated arrow keys, but did print little arrows on the H J K L keys themselves. That accident of hardware became the convention millions of people now use by reflex.

Turning it on

The Navigation section has two switches, and each works on its own — turn on either one, or both:

Navigate by character — while the Hyper Key is held, H J K L act as the arrow keys. See Character motions.
Navigate by word — while the Hyper Key is held, W moves forward a word and B moves back a word. See Word motions.

Both settings are off until you turn them on.

The Navigation section with the Navigate by character and Navigate by word toggles — Turning Vim-style navigation on

Vim Motions ride on top of the Hyper Key, so they only work while the Hyper Key is enabled. If you haven’t set the Hyper Key up yet, this section stays greyed out until you do — see the Hyper Key page to get it running. By default the Hyper Key lives on your Caps Lock key, so the everyday gesture is: hold Caps Lock, then tap H / J / K / L.

Character motions

With Navigate by character on, while you hold the Hyper Key, the four keys map to the arrows like this:

Hold Hyper Key +	Cursor moves	Same as
`H`	left	`←`
`J`	down	`↓`
`K`	up	`↑`
`L`	right	`→`

Every other key keeps working as a normal Hyper Key shortcut — only the motion keys you’ve turned on are treated as motions, and only while the Hyper Key is down. Let go of the Hyper Key and those keys type letters again as usual.

Holding to repeat

You don’t have to tap once per step. Hold one of the keys down (while still holding the Hyper Key) and the cursor keeps moving in that direction, the same way holding a real arrow key repeats. Hold Hyper Key + J to glide down through a paragraph, for example.

For the technically curious. Uncapped rewrites H J K L into plain arrow-key presses — with none of the Hyper Key’s ⇧⌃⌥⌘ modifiers attached — so as far as macOS and the app you’re typing in are concerned, you simply pressed an arrow key. That’s why it works in any standard text field, and why holding a key repeats for free: the key-repeat is the system’s own, not something Uncapped has to simulate.

Word motions

With Navigate by word on, while you hold the Hyper Key, two more keys move the cursor a whole word at a time — the same as Vim’s w and b:

Hold Hyper Key +	Cursor moves	Same as
`W`	forward a word	`⌥→`
`B`	back a word	`⌥←`

Like the character motions, holding W or B keeps jumping word after word. Add ⇧ (hold Hyper Key + ⇧ + W) to select word by word instead of just moving.

For the technically curious. Uncapped turns W and B into ⌥→ and ⌥←, the Mac’s own move-by-word shortcuts, so the cursor stops wherever that app normally stops when you jump by word. On a Mac, moving forward lands at the end of the current word, so W behaves a little more like Vim’s e than its w.

More motions on the way

For now, Vim Motions cover the four directional moves (H J K L) and jumping by word (W B). Vim itself has a much richer vocabulary (jumping to the start or end of a line, a paragraph, and so on), and we’d like to bring more of those motions to Uncapped over time.

If there’s a motion you’d love to see — or a way you’d like these to behave — we’d genuinely like to hear it. Get in touch and tell us which Vim motions should come next; what we add will be guided by what people actually want.

Modifier Keys Snippets