You could say that there was Titan but in practice they were not seriously considered. At least for gaming.

jkl; would get you movement over home row without moving hand/fingers at all. ijkl would get you movement without involving pinky and some people like that.

If you have (and I do) column-staggered ergonomic keyboard - meaning columns are shifted according for length of your fingers - hjkl makes you move fingers to columns that are slightly off.

I don't see a single objective benefit for choosing hjkl on its own. Yet it's still there and I don't take "they did in vi" as valid for new editor. They could make alternative scheme for vi-comers, but as main idea again?

What you mentioned - g-h and g-l - are definitely more consistent than what vi did.

My point is that position is the primary thing that's important for an editor when used for a long time. Your hands and fingers move in physical space, not over alphabet. They get tired and maybe get repetitive strain injuries over real movement.

Mnemomics way of setting up keyboard layout (or rather typewriter) would be to put everything in alphabet order. But we quickly realized that it's not a good way. `d` is where it is because according to (imperfect) research it's a common letter and so in QWERTY layout this letter should be on your home row.

Putting A-something on `a` because the word starts with `a` is not a long term design. Considerations should be based on usage. How often is this used? Put it closer to home row. Is it designed to be often used with another command? If often, those two probably shouldn't be on single finger. And so on.

There is argument for easier start - except that I said already - modal editors are unusable without reading docs first, so that argument doesn't really hold.

For example - let's put "go all the way to the right" on the left button. And "go all the way to the left on the combo of modifier with right button". I'm talking about 0 and $ (Shift+4) for vi. It's not consistent, it's not ergonomic or easy to input when properly touch typing. It's almost an accidental control scheme because it was based on no longer existing keyboard keycap labels. And in this case where you can't even exit vi without first reading a manual, half an hour reduction in learning time that you get from remembering that `i` is Insert will not compensate for hundreds or thousands hours using later when you will be pressing button not by looking at keyboard but by muscle memory.

Cmd-C is not any more ergonomic than Ctrl-C. You are only speaking from position of habit. Pressing modifier with tucked in thumb is not great for it.

If someone is concerned about ergonomics, they should buy ergonomic keyboard. Standard layouts are crap.

Also if that's what you believe, players who start after day 1 will not have mystery. Even players who start day 1 but can't dedicate all of their time to the game will inevitably spoil themselves when they have to do anything else, meaning someone will progress farther than they and will share that info.

And I have to say I'm happy without vendor lock-in.

Nothing absolute that I couldn't live without. But TUI is essentially a design written for the lowest common denominator. It doesn't matter that I have had high resolution displays for years, average TUI is designed as if I'm using computer older than me.

Then to actually have games, Apple would need to make stable tooling and convince developers to port games to their platform. And convince everyone that they will support it and not drop it.

So it took decades to understand that things aren't working and then investment from multi-billion company to finally start getting anywhere.

Meanwhile on Windows you can play today, could play 10 years ago, could 20 years ago. That should answer how it's still in business. It just works.

Also "a lot of games benchmark better" - some games. And then some games don't work at all. And some games work with minor or significant issues. Which is not a slight against Wine and Proton as it's not an easy task.

As for companies being shit, that's just capitalism, but plenty of people believe that's the only way.