Vim Adventures

http://vim-adventures.com

by DanielRibeiro • 13 years ago

140 54 13 years ago

vim-adventures.com

ZirconCode• 13 years ago

I remember giving my e-mail to this, the last time it came around. Didn't get anything though.

A part from that, it's a great way to learn VIM.

javert• 13 years ago

The level of creativity here is mind-blowing.

jdkanani• 13 years ago

Amazing !! Wonderful way to practice VIM.

jre• 13 years ago

Really impressive. Very creative and quite polished.

gelisam• 13 years ago

You're kidding, right?

I want to like this game; I love vim, and I agree that the premise of the game is very creative. But the execution is vastly below average. They are using free graphics [1], annoying sounds, and they force the user through a strict tutorial instead of encouraging them to explore [2]. They ask for more (25$) than the vast majority of indie games on Steam [3], all of which are a lot more polished than this. And even then your license is only valid for six months, something I thought was only done by MMORPGs!

[1] http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/05/dancs-miraculously-flexibl...

[2] http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning...

[3] http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Indie/

mamoswined• 13 years ago

Yeah, I would gladly pay $10, not $25

dmead• 13 years ago

i tried to go back a word with control-w and it killed the tab :(

loser777• 13 years ago

Slightly ironic: doesn't work well with the Vimperator add-on + Firefox, as Vimperator is going to consume the keystrokes (especially the most used ones such as hjkl).

Great idea though (once you turn off Vimperator) :) !

ichinaski• 13 years ago

Same here with Chrome's Vimium. Once the URL is excluded, it works fine.

H3g3m0n2• 13 years ago

Doh, I was wondering why I could only move in 'insert' mode. Guess I was entering Vimiums insert mode rather than the game.

uulbiy• 13 years ago

Same with pentadactyl. However with CTRL+z you can temporarily disable pentadactyl (I think it's the same shortcut in vimperator) until you press ESC.

If the developer is here and wants a workaround there is a way to make the game work with pentadactyl/vimperator without disabling them. The h/j/k/l keys do not work in insert mode, so on page load focus in a hidden textbox and capture keys pressed in the textbox.

sfaruque• 13 years ago

First of all, awesome concept. This might just force me to stop using nano all the time.

I'm curious though as to why the developer chose to limit the license to 6 months when charging a flat ~$5 per month might be easier to sell?

H3g3m0n2• 13 years ago

Yeh, subscription seems silly. Might be an attempt for corporate users training staff regularly.

johncoltrane7• 13 years ago

Hahaha… Vim adventures again.

People, if you are curious about Vim, just run the command below if you are on any UNIX-y machine:

    $ vimtutor

That's really all you need. If you don't have Vim installed, just install it and run vimtutor anyway.

Once you have got the basics right, no bullshit payware game or online drillings or online interactive tutorials will help you improve your skills. Only your accumulated experience, curiosity and willingness to learn will.

rhizome31• 13 years ago

As a long time Vim user, I also found the book Practical Vim very instructive. Not really suitable for beginners though.

jacobparker• 13 years ago

I'd like to second this. There is a lot to Vim and Practical Vim is an excellent read. This book covers a lot of ground and the way it internally references itself is excellent (great for jumping around).

Links for the lazy (non-affiliate)

http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim-Thought-Pragmatic-Progra...

The better you get at Vim the easier it is to learn more Vim.

jfabre• 13 years ago

Whatever you say, I actually learned vim with this game and also had moderate fun for only 10$ or so. It's clearly a win for me.

The big payoff with this game is that it forced me to practice. Within two hours of game play I had the 'hjkl' fixed for good.

I'll take a look at vimtutor to see if it can complement what I already learned.

johncoltrane7• 13 years ago

hjkl are almost worthless compared to other means of navigation and you wasted 2 hours and 10$ to fix them for good.

Vimtutor teaches you most of what you learned but for free, within Vim itself and in the context of actual text editing.

If you want to learn Vim, use it.

joelhooks• 13 years ago

You're most definitely my favorite VIM curmudgeon.

johncoltrane7• 13 years ago

Thanks.

vysakh0• 13 years ago

Isn't this website there long time ago? I had given up trying it as Vimium came in the middle but reading from other comments, I could now play in the site going to the insert mode in Vimium.

Might be a good practice for beginners who need to make their fingers type the Vim way.

manifesto2• 13 years ago

What about the folks using Dvorak keyboard??

spajus• 13 years ago

Read here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_Vim_with_the_Dvorak_keyboard...

Are there many guys using Dvorak? I only met one in my whole life.

manifesto2• 13 years ago

Now you meet two.

sneak• 13 years ago

The best hacker I ever knew used dvorak. He went off the grid to become a welder or something, but he was _fast_.

mcgaffin• 13 years ago

I use Dvorak. I never bothered to maintain the QWERTY keyboard for vim movement. Now, it seems completely natural to navigate with the Dvorak mappings for h,j,k,l, etc. I can't easily navigate one-handed, I guess, but that is never really a problem.

jcoder• 13 years ago

That article is probably doing more harm than good. Using Vim with Dvorak came as naturally as switching to Dvorak from QWERTY (that is, it took some work, but now I wouldn't use anything else).

sergeykish• 13 years ago

Switched to vim and dvorak same day five years ago. Default mapping is very natural - left hand (qwerty "c" and "v") used for vertical movement, right hand (qwerty "j" and "p") for horizontal movement.

milesf• 13 years ago

One of the top Ruby User Groups in the world has a large number of Dvorak users. I mimicked them and posted about it on Slashdot years ago: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/07/04/15/0043237/is-dvorak-gai...

jimmy_wobbles• 13 years ago

As an avid Vim user, I must say this is really great! I'll show this to some friends of mine I'm trying to get them to start using Vim...

sikhnerd• 13 years ago

Previously on hn, with some good discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877880

chrisrhoden• 13 years ago

"In the next few days detailed Terms and Conditions will be added to the site. Anyone using this site will be bound by these terms and conditions."

This makes your terms and conditions (almost certainly) irrelevant. Judges don't look favorably on asking people to sign a contract that they can't read.

oddshocks• 13 years ago

What do you mean, I "don't have the x key"?!

klibertp5• 13 years ago

Is there anything similar for Emacs?

Disclaimer: Now, stop, please. I know of Emacs manual, tutorial and all the other built-in docs. Stop telling me to use them, because I won't, thank you.

I'm recently learning Emacs - I reached high proficiency in Vim and I thought about learning it's competitor, just to feel comfortable with them both. I like Lisps, so that's another motivation.

I had a hard time in the beginning. I was missing tabs (elscreen) and many other features and familiar keybindings, so I installed Evil and made my own mappings. Now I can live with Emacs, but I realized that while I learned a bit about how Emacs works and how to script it, I completely neglected the idea of feeling comfortable in raw Emacs! I probably could M-x and M-: my way on Emacsen other than mine, but that's hardly the point :)

So, is there something interactive one could use to learn Emacs editing basics?

jcrites• 13 years ago

> Now, stop, please. I know of Emacs manual, tutorial and all the other built-in docs. Stop telling me to use them, because I won't, thank you.

Why not? If there are problems like they're hard to read, understand, you've tried them and they don't match your learning style, etc., then it would be better to say that instead. As written, this isn't very constructive since you don't explain why you find fault with the documentation.

I would not know how to fix the problem in that documentation, if I wanted to, or point you to documentation that doesn't have the problem, since I don't know what the problem is.

(Note: I'm not an Emacs expert and have no knowledge of the documentation you're referring to, or any other documentation. I'm responding primarily to your rhetoric.)

andyl• 13 years ago

Is there any way for a Vim session to span multiple monitors? Multiple terminals? That is what I would like more than anything.

gcb0• 13 years ago

just stretch the window and create windows in vim.

but i bet what you want is to use the system clipboard, so that you can copy from one buffer in one window to another.

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip21

Kluny• 13 years ago

I really want to play! 25 bucks is too much. Can't it be 5 dollars instead?

Vim Adventures

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