> - 6 months access to VIM Adventures<p>> - 13 fun and engaging levels<p>> - More than 60 commands and motions<p>> - Covers most of the keyboard<p>> - Now for only $25<p>I personally think it is a wonderful idea and love how it is implemented(got very excited the first time I saw it). But I can not justify $ 25 for a game I can only use for 6 months, but I will pay $ 25 once off.<p>Then again one need to take hosting costs, and the time it took the creator to make the game in to account; and lastly it is his product so he can set the price point to whatever.<p>It will just not bring the joy of vim to African kids in Uganda.
there is also vimgolf[1] for a free and more challenging alternative, in which you solve
various text editing problems with least number of keystrokes. it has a nice cli[2]
that retrieves problems to the real vim editor, and submits scores. it is
interesting to see how other players in the leaderboard solve the same problems
differently, and you learn a few useful tricks along the way.<p>1: <a href="http://vimgolf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://vimgolf.com/</a><p>2: <a href="https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf</a>
I bought this game a few years ago. I learned quite a few things about vim. Unfortunately the puzzles in the later levels aren't very clear. I spent hours trying to figure out what on earth they wanted me to do. To me this was counter productive and got less and less fun. I ended up leaving the last few levels unfinished as I felt I got very minimal returns for time invested.<p>If you're interested in picking up vim, I love it for the first 5 or so levels. After that, not so much. (I currently still use sublime text but do occasionally use vim on servers)
About vim: There is one thing that always has bothered me a lot, and it is that I am lefty, and I tend to think that at the left I have the "arrow up".
Naturally I always expect the "arrow up" at the left, but it is hjkl.
I'd pay $25 for permanent access and/or an offline version.
However I dislike the 6 month access a lot, and it burns a little of the good will I have.
I've been using ShortcutFoo. It's pretty good to force myself to learn the basics.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/vim" rel="nofollow">https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/vim</a>
I highly recommend this to anyone interested in vim. Vim-adventures is how I got into using vim as my main editor.<p>Also for the people complaining about the 6 month access, I get your point but I think this is meant to be just an easy introduction to vim, not a tool for mastering it. I played this for only like a month or two and after I knew enough to start using vim as my main editor I hardly ever touched it again. I haven't even finished the game.
Two and three years ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689971" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689971</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877880" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877880</a>
The Vimium extension for Chrome is a decent way to get used to the 'hjkl' movement key bindings. I also love being able to yank/put URLs as well as navigate through tabs using VIM-esque key bindings.
I played through all the free levels. It's slow, you don't learn a lot, and you end up having to pay to keep going.<p>If you are learning I'd advise you to check stuff like this: <a href="http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...</a><p>They show you a few shortcuts on a keyboard layout and they keep on adding shortcuts to the pictures so you can learn at a nice pace.
I teach a first year Intro to Unix module (CS and ICT) at a University in the UK.<p>We ran this for our students as an exercise and it went down really well. We've got people using Vim on a daily basis who probably would have never heard of it otherwise.<p>It's a great way to beat the learning curve that vimtutor represents, for people who prefer more visual challenges.
FWIW, I learned the vi cursor keystrokes playing rogue in 1982. I also learned C studying the source, while staring at lines like
while (<i>j++=</i>i++);
which was a pretty strange construct to a Pascal programmer.
It's broken for me as I have "start searching as soon as you start typing" feature on in my browser. It's searching instead of moving. Latest Firefox on GNU/Linux.
I'd love to be able to reassign some keys. I use colemak and for example h,j,k,l need to be reassigned to actually be usable (otherwise, the layout hardly makes sense).
pacvim is also a nice game for learning vim keys:
<a href="https://github.com/jmoon018/PacVim" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jmoon018/PacVim</a>
Bit off-topic but that pleasing musical sound when you hit the space bar is really like the first note in Aphex Twin's "PAPAT4 (Pineal Mix)" :)
Learning Vim if you don't know it already is a waste of time for new programmers. If you want a text editor, use Sublime. If you happen to be in a terminal without a GUI, and need to edit something real quick, just use Nano.<p>Don't spend your valuable time learning Vim. It's not worth it.
I dont do that much text editing. I use notepad++ . Is vim super amazing or something? ps. I usually work on a windows machine but vim is available for windows.<p>EDIT: Also emacs is available for windows, isnt emacs meant to be the ultimate text editor type thing? I dont really have any need to these, I'm just curious really. When Ive had to do perform some weird operation on a load of text or source code for example I've just written a script to do it.