Navigation, deletion, and mouse

The pink and brown areas around the home row carry the layout's most frequent operations. The navigation and deletion families together carry 114 of the 282 mappings in V3.1, so this is the part of the layout worth learning first.

The navigator block

H J K L move left, down, up, and right, exactly as in Vim. Directly above them, U I O P extend the same idea to whole pages and lines: Page Up, Home, End, Page Down.

Those eight keys are the only ones mapped on nine different planes. Each group of planes below covers one job, and together they account for 72 of the 282 mappings in V3.1.

Moving and selecting text

The text layer follows one rule: hold ⌘ and a movement becomes a selection, because the rule emits the same arrow key with ⇧ added. Adding ⌥ on top widens the unit: a character becomes a word, a line becomes three lines, half a line becomes the whole line.

That is why ✱+ with ⌘+ with ⌥+ with I jumps to the end of the line and then selects back to its start: it is the fastest way to grab exactly one line without touching the mouse.

Switching apps, windows, tabs and desktops

⇧ moves between containers, the thing you are looking at rather than the text inside it, while ⌃ talks to the window server.

Pointer and wheel from the home row

Four more planes turn the same eight keys into a mouse, without your hands moving at all. ⇧ is the accelerator in both modes.

The middle mouse button is the one exception: it lives on ✱+ with ⌥+ with ↩ rather than on a navigator key.

Arrow-key mouse control

The physical arrow keys drive the pointer too, which is often quicker than reaching for the home-row layer. Here ⌥ slows down and ⌘ speeds up, in both pointer and wheel modes.

All five mouse buttons sit on ↩:

Semantic deletion

N M , . sit directly below the navigation keys. The pair on the left deletes backwards, the pair on the right deletes forwards, and the unit grows as you add modifiers.

Two rows break the pattern deliberately. ✱+ with ⌥+ with N and ✱+ with ⌥+ with . both send ⌘+ with ⌫, clearing everything from the cursor back to the start of the line, so the outer keys of the block are the "throw this line away" pair. And ✱+ with ⌥+ with M / ✱+ with ⌥+ with , do not delete at all: they emit ⌥+ with ⇧+ with ↓ and ⌥+ with ⇧+ with ↑, the move-line-down/up shortcut that IntelliJ, VS Code and most editors share.

Numeric keypad as a mouse

If your keyboard has a keypad, Hyper turns the whole block into a mouse. The digits give eight directions around a neutral 5; the top row scrolls; the bottom and right edges are the five buttons.

The same speed modifiers apply as everywhere else: ⌥ slows the pointer to half, ⌘ doubles it, and adding ⇧ converts pointer motion into wheel motion at the matching speed.

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