Show HN: Vimgolf.ai – Learn Vim by playing through a map of levels
vimgolf.aiJust launched my app, VimGolf.ai! As users complete the levels on the map, I introduce progressively more complicated concepts — it’s aimed at people who have never used Vim. Any feedback would be much appreciated!
Uses unholy amounts of CPU making my laptop's fans spin out of control. Editing is very slow, too. Not really a good impression of vim. I'm still going to recommend people to use vimtutor to get used to vim.
Hmm, I’ll look into the CPU processing performance. Maybe it’s the menu animations? And yes vimtutor continues to be a great resource that Braam made. I mainly made this app to gamify learning the vim skills.
I'm all for the people who want to use nerdy software like Vim to do things in their own special way without ever touching a mouse, but I'm amused thinking, how dense is the UX of your text editor if people are coming up with creative forms of training to learn it?
I don’t know I feel pretty crazy having created this all to make learning vim easier. Not all Vim users are like me. Why don’t you try it out?
I was asked to zap some characters which I did. Then I realized I zapped the wrong character... and that's when I realized I'm in a text editor and I have no clue how to type text LOL.
Thanks for trying!
The reason I started with vim was to do live writing of latex notes while listening to conference lectures, on a small notebook. I did not want to bring a mouse with me due to the extra weight and usually lack of a mouse surface.
With the constraint that you simply don't have a mouse available, vim turned out to be faster from day 1 than alternative editors. Even knowing just a couple of vim movements.
And then I liked it and wanted to learn more.
The pricing says one time payment but the price is $25 for 6 months.
Is this 6 months of access or 6 months of updates and lifetime access to those updated versions?
6 months of access to current and updated version from purchase date. But considering making it lifetime if there’s popular demand for it via feedback.
The amount of free trial subscription slop SaaS software has really gotten out of control. The gall people have to attempt to sell a subscription to something like this is something else.
My app is actually cheaper than vim-adventures or other popular paid Vim learning sites. If you are against using my app, I encourage you to use vimtutor. A great free way to learn Vim.
I get a Forbidden white screen in the vim "window" and that's that
Thanks for the feedback! What browser are you using? Sometimes the containers also don’t work properly with certain VPNs.
Could be it, Firefox w/ Mullvad on Linux. Gets a 403 on the second /session call, first one is a 302.
Thank you, investigating this
Can you add Helix golf support?
I’ll look into it! Definitely worth pursuing
can you make the "Next level" button capture the enter key stroke? That way you'd never have to leave the keyboard
Brilliant, I’ll add that today
https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf
I assume you're not the creator of vimgolf so I'll leave this here for source reference
Vimgolf.com is another great way to learn Vim. I created Vimgolf.ai mainly to challenge users by comparing their score against bot entries.
I've wanted something like this for quite a while. I'm such a "basic" vim user, despite the fact that I'm 20 years into it... I do everything in INSERT mode, like a pleb. These might actually help me start using vim as it was intended to be
Thank you so much for your feedback!
My only criticism is, could there be a tutorial mode? There's nowhere to actually walk you through any of the steps, the "teaching your cursor to walk" thing doesn't, to my knowledge, actually teach you - you have to figure it out for yourself, it just tells you how much worse you did than the bot.
I’ll look into making it more user intuitive. I tried in a way through the gifs, but I could find other ways to help guide the user more.
That page was overwhelming and visually tiring for me, especially with the animation, so I gave up on it, sorry.