Show HN: Vimgolf.ai – Learn Vim by playing through a map of levels

Posted by nickandbro 3 days ago

Just 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!

Comments

Comment by BoxwoodSeed 3 days 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.

Comment by nickandbro 3 days 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.

Comment by MetaWhirledPeas 3 days 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?

Comment by futune 3 days 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.

Comment by nickandbro 3 days 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?

Comment by MetaWhirledPeas 3 days ago

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.

Comment by nickandbro 3 days ago

Thanks for trying!

Comment by philajan 3 days 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?

Comment by nickandbro 3 days 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.

Comment by einpoklum 3 days ago

That page was overwhelming and visually tiring for me, especially with the animation, so I gave up on it, sorry.

Comment by NewsaHackO 3 days 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.

Comment by nickandbro 3 days 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.

Comment by nylonstrung 3 days ago

Can you add Helix golf support?

Comment by nickandbro 3 days ago

I’ll look into it! Definitely worth pursuing

Comment by pluc 3 days ago

I get a Forbidden white screen in the vim "window" and that's that

Comment by nickandbro 3 days ago

Thanks for the feedback! What browser are you using? Sometimes the containers also don’t work properly with certain VPNs.

Comment by pluc 3 days ago

Could be it, Firefox w/ Mullvad on Linux. Gets a 403 on the second /session call, first one is a 302.

Comment by nickandbro 3 days ago

Thank you, investigating this

Comment by bhkdotdev 3 days ago

can you make the "Next level" button capture the enter key stroke? That way you'd never have to leave the keyboard

Comment by nickandbro 3 days ago

Brilliant, I’ll add that today

Comment by VVilhelmsen 3 days ago

https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf

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

Comment by nickandbro 3 days 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.

Comment by Hugsbox 3 days 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

Comment by nickandbro 3 days ago

Thank you so much for your feedback!

Comment by Hugsbox 3 days 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.

Comment by nickandbro 3 days 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.