VimGolf.com - real Vim ninjas count every keystroke

by igrigorik • 16 years ago

178 79 16 years ago

SwellJoe• 16 years ago

Where are the solutions? That's the fun thing about Perl golf is seeing how people did it in X characters. Without solutions...well, I don't see the point.

igrigorik2• 16 years ago

I'm logging the solutions, but in real MVP fashion... not showing them just yet. Need to bootstrap a vimscript parser first.

If anyone is up for it, would love some help with the client/parser: https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf

Complete3• 16 years ago

I will take part in this when the solutions are displayed. All the fun is in the solutions. So for me, hiding them kills the whole point of the project. Otherwise it would be lots of fun. Im a long time vim user and love it.

preek• 16 years ago

MVP meaning 'Most Valuable Player'?

rue• 16 years ago

Is the parser for deconstructing the solutions? That'd be a useful feature to have along with the solutions themselves.

snprbob86• 16 years ago

Do you really need to do anything super smart with them? Could you at least link to the logged scripts as files? Smarter stuff can come later.

igrigorik2• 16 years ago

Good news. You can now preview the solutions!

Only one wrinkle: you have to submit your own challenge to see the solutions.

Ex: http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a8bf2b8cb3409320002c4

Bud• 16 years ago

This is one of the most wonderfully geeky things I have ever seen. The analogy to golf is exceptionally well-drawn, too! It might be entertaining if you developed the parallel even more, perhaps by adapting some of The Rules of Golf to your project.

rbxbx• 16 years ago

Not an original concept here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Perl_golf

'Golfing' different languages has been around for some time.

No discredit to the site though, certainly happy to have Vim golfing join the ranks.

DEinspanjer3• 16 years ago

Ugh.. wanted to play with it, but after three years, there still isn't a simple way to get Ruby and Gems working nicely with modern Ruby apps on OSX. Searching for ways to update show a variety of hacks, each uglier than the last. Of course, I could always build it from source.. ::sigh::

luigi2• 16 years ago

Not sure what you mean, as the vast majority of Ruby developers I know use OS X. Ruby works out of the box on Snow Leopard. Or try Homebrew. Or RVM.

DEinspanjer3• 16 years ago

I'm running an MBP received a clean install of the first Snow Leopard release and has subsequently gone through the normal system updates. On this system, and the previous one that was running 10.5, I've never managed to get RubyGems updated successfully.. hence, when I try to gem install vimgolf, it tells me that I need rubygems >=1.3.6. I guess I'm just failing as a hacker and missing something obvious. Grr.

Well, I just discovered that I had two different conflicting gem home dirs. was able to set GEM_HOME and do "gem cleanup" and things seem to be a bit better now. Yay!

gfodor4• 16 years ago

Anyone else having problems signing in? I connected my twitter account but its still thinking I'm not logged in.

luigi2• 16 years ago

I want to go head to head with someone in match play.

bradendouglass• 16 years ago

precisely what I was thinking.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

DJ Hero has a great feature where after you beat a song, you can "Challenge a friend" and it sends a message to them that says something along the lines of "Steve just scored 200,000 points on $SONG_NAME. Can you do better? OK/CANCEL/ABORT"

Symmetry3• 16 years ago

Lets see, for the simple text editing: qa/vim<ENTER>yypjddq@a@a so 18.

Complete3• 16 years ago

qa/v<ENTER>yypjddq@a@a

16 :P

Symmetry3• 16 years ago

qa/v<ENTER>yypJDq@a@a

Xurinos2• 16 years ago

If this contest also rated by finger distance (one of vim's strengths), I'd propose qq and @q@@ instead of using the "a" register.

burgerbrain• 16 years ago

Yeah, how does this prevent somebody from making a macro that does the entire file, then "completing" the file with the two* keystrokes it takes to fire off that macro?

Or one, mapping space to @q is convenient :)

BrandonM4• 16 years ago

qq3jYpJDq@q@@

Edit: I can trim one more off, to make it 12:

qq3jYpJDq2@q

Complete3• 16 years ago

Awesome! You are currently the winner!

meastham2• 16 years ago

Kinda a bummer for those of us who don't use twitter..

Edit: Still a very cool project though

meastham2• 16 years ago

Is there anything to stop people form just writing a macro beforehand that does each task? I'm guessing that's how the guy who 4 keystrokes on Simple Text Editing accomplished that.

gfodor4• 16 years ago

The people submitting scores of 4 are probably just adding macros to their .vimrc

gfodor4• 16 years ago

OP: can you figure out a way to get vim to not load vimrc?

silentbicycle3• 16 years ago

vim -u NONE

(real Vim ninjas read man pages)

duck• 16 years ago

They just fixed that.

devin• 16 years ago

I had an idea for an emacs version of this.

Anyone have any ideas on how you'd implement this with emacs?

jlongster• 16 years ago

My emacs-fu is pretty stale, but I'm sure it has the hooks to track what you need. Although, Emacs isn't all about keystrokes, it's more about interactive coding and an integrated development environment.

Maybe you could do something more along the lines of Perl golf, where you achieve certain things in as little code as possible.

lelele3• 16 years ago

What? Viewing/counting keystrokes? Then "C-h l".

aerique• 16 years ago

Perhaps Xah Lee's command frequencies script is a start?

silentbicycle3• 16 years ago

You could check keystrokes used with C-h l (or M-x view-lossage), but Emacs's whole design is based on extensibility rather than terse, orthogonal, and (usually) single-key commands. Don't find a clever way to knock it down to 30 keystrokes (or whatever) - when you notice a common operation, script it, name it, bind it, now it's two or three keystrokes.

clvv5• 16 years ago

Until somebody can come up with at least some method of restricting vim scripting, the results are useless(one can easily only use 4 key strokes by key mapping as you can see). But, on the other hand, you can't just disable vim from loading scripts, because there's no point in mastering the plain old vim without any plugins, custom key mappings and such.

askedrelic• 16 years ago

I've been trying with editing the file in another editor, then :e! :wq which seems to give 17/18 score mostly.

I love this idea and love the challenge, but would love to make it less hackable as well.

jjcm9• 16 years ago

ZZ instead of :wq will knock a letter off. I'm guessing that's what the current leader with 16 is doing on this challenge: http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a1c36567bac34a9000002

zacharycohn• 16 years ago

Hey! You demo'd this to me at Beer && Code a few weeks ago. Good to see this has come along!

exogen2• 16 years ago

Heh, that was me, and this is actually a completely independent project. Mine's still coming along, and I think it's an improvement.

exogen2• 16 years ago

Ha, I just started working on the same exact project a few weeks ago. Great minds think alike, I guess. I'm taking a different approach, so I'll still launch it to see what people think.

I brought up this idea in a "gamification of software development" talk I gave last April.

neilk• 16 years ago

Unbelievable. I had this exact same idea. Get out of my mind!

Calamitous3• 16 years ago

Me too. :) This is a much, much nicer implementation than anything I had in mind, though,

eterps• 16 years ago

Any tips on improving 'Sort and add attributes'?

I have scored 38 with:

:sor<ENTER>:%s/)/, :country => "USA")/<ENTER>

clvv5• 16 years ago

I think this is the shortest solution unless someone has sort mapped to hot-keys, which is unlikely.

birken• 16 years ago

:sor|%s/)/, :country => "USA")<ENTER> works for me

This shaves off a few chars: a) combining the commands b) leaving off the last / in the search/replace

DEinspanjer3• 16 years ago

This one gives a score of 32, but I like it just for the sheer one-liner obsfucatedness:

  :g/#/+1s/\v(.*)\n.*/\1\r\1

BrandonM4• 16 years ago

ed golf, eh?

jjcm9• 16 years ago

You should really make some challenges that require the users to pass multiple tests with the same script. Sure, you can solve the reformat/refactor challenge by

    jd2jVjj=f(ci)*a^]jcfda.join(',')^]

but it wont generalize anywhere. Having a full script though that will detect and do that automagically, now there's the fun part.

jjcm9• 16 years ago

    4JD=Gjwci(*a^]jcfda.join(',')^]

God this is addicting. Shaved off a few characters.

edit: switch the first three letters to j3D, as 4JD seems to work differently between my two machines.

callahad2• 16 years ago

I held the title on "Brackets or Braces?" [0] for a good seven minutes with a 44 character solution [1], only to be ousted by @ryanmusicman with 42. Can anyone see an obvious way to improve mine?

[0] http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a522ea860b7447200010b

[1] https://gist.github.com/757767

clvv5• 16 years ago

A quick thought: use surround.vim plugin for this.

callahad2• 16 years ago

Sadly, that's not allowed :(

jjcm9• 16 years ago

Here's my Flodder Challenge (http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a4f2ba860b744720000bf) solution:

    ~wqave~2wq@aw2@ab~ws**^]l~fe~ww@afg@aZZ

(where ^] is an esc). Currently gets a score of 41 (although I only count 38 keystrokes...)

seles• 16 years ago

You can also use Vi for hundreds of challenges at http://golf.shinh.org alot of the newer challenges are stale but some of the older ones are gold.

jjcm9• 16 years ago

Different game, that's counting the resulting code that you create. This is counting the number of keystrokes to create the code (for some at least).

jjcm9• 16 years ago

FizzBuzz: (score: 71)

    i1^]
    qaYp
    CTRL+a
    q98@aggjjqaA Fizz^]
    3jq32@agg:5
    ENTER
    qaA Buzz^]
    5jq19@a:%s/z B/zB/
    ENTER
    ZZ

psadauskas• 16 years ago

You don't need the "gg" (move to top) before ":5" (go to line 5)

jjcm9• 16 years ago

Right, I'm an idiot. Good catch - likewise the ggjj earlier can just be :3[enter]

clvv5• 16 years ago

You can achieve even less key strokes if you have your vim automatically removes trailing spaces, which is a neat feature itself and a common hack.

autocmd BufWritePre * :%s/\s\+$//

53 is the least I got.

jjcm9• 16 years ago

Looks like Tim Pope started playing. He's talking about the "anti cheat" mechanisms on twitter: http://twitter.com/tpope/status/19900265129836544

Calamitous3• 16 years ago

This awesomeness unexpectedly sucked away half my afternoon. Not really sure whether to be upset about it our not. :)

Only thing is that the key counting doesn't seem to be consistent. :\ Using the command history seems to really, really screw with the counts. I thought it counted up all the characters in the submitted command, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I submitted an 18 for the "Sort and add attributes" challenge, then realized that the text for the new key is longer than that. :\

I'm not really clear on what "counts" as a keypress (shift key? colon for commands? Paste commands? Esc?) and I haven't been able to get any of my "scores" to match up with the count in my head.

All that aside, this is a barrel of fun, and I'm sure these kinks will get worked out.

Calamitous3• 16 years ago

Also, it would be awesome if I could delete some of my scores. :\ My bogus win and early attempts are cluttering up the leaderboard.

jh3• 16 years ago

Only scored a 27 on the 'Reverse characters in a line' challenge...

I was trying to do this:

  :s/./&\r/g|g/^/m0|j!

However, that causes a to be before b for some reason.

So I ended up doing:

  :s/./&\\r/g|g/^/m0\rV}gJ

Anyone know why appending j! joins everything correctly except a and b?

VimGolf.com - real Vim ninjas count every keystroke

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