Show HN: Vimgolf.ai – Learn Vim by playing through a map of levels(vimgolf.ai)
32 pointsby nickandbro7 hours ago10 comments
  • MetaWhirledPeas2 hours ago
    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?
    • futune9 minutes ago
      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.

    • nickandbro34 minutes ago
      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?
  • philajanan hour ago
    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?

    • nickandbro38 minutes ago
      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.
  • BoxwoodSeed4 hours ago
    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.
    • nickandbro4 hours ago
      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.
  • bhkdotdev3 hours ago
    can you make the "Next level" button capture the enter key stroke? That way you'd never have to leave the keyboard
    • nickandbro2 hours ago
      Brilliant, I’ll add that today
  • NewsaHackO4 hours ago
    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.
    • nickandbro4 hours ago
      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.
  • pluc5 hours ago
    I get a Forbidden white screen in the vim "window" and that's that
    • nickandbro5 hours ago
      Thanks for the feedback! What browser are you using? Sometimes the containers also don’t work properly with certain VPNs.
      • pluc5 hours ago
        Could be it, Firefox w/ Mullvad on Linux. Gets a 403 on the second /session call, first one is a 302.
        • nickandbro5 hours ago
          Thank you, investigating this
  • nylonstrung6 hours ago
    Can you add Helix golf support?
    • nickandbro5 hours ago
      I’ll look into it! Definitely worth pursuing
  • einpoklum2 hours ago
    That page was overwhelming and visually tiring for me, especially with the animation, so I gave up on it, sorry.
  • VVilhelmsen4 hours ago
    https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf

    I assume you're not the creator of vimgolf so I'll leave this here for source reference

    • nickandbro4 hours ago
      Vimgolf.com is another great way to learn Vim. I created Vimgolf.ai mainly to challenge users by comparing their score against bot entries.
  • Hugsbox4 hours ago
    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
    • nickandbro4 hours ago
      Thank you so much for your feedback!
      • Hugsbox4 hours ago
        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.
        • nickandbro4 hours ago
          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.