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OpenVim: Learn Vim in Your Browser
- Greg12x 15y agoWow. This is really helpful. I have always wanted to learn vim.
- hunterclarke 15y agoI was just looking for something like this the other day. Good timing.
- kmm 15y agoDoes anyone else have problems with Vim on AZERTY keyboards? It's really annoying that I have to hold shift to enter numbers.
- bmccormack 15y agoIt's not working for me on Chrome Stable 14.0.835.186 m. The report bug link gives me a 404. Looks like it works fine on Firefox 6.0.2, though.
- mushishi 15y agoI fixed the report bug link. Thanks!
- nakkiel 15y agoHow is this supposed to help anyone exactly? Many commands simply don't work (^ or $ to name just two). People: skip this and use vim's :help.
- magicseth 15y agoI've tried to learn vi for years. The simplicity of this tutorial is the first thing that allowed me to "get it." Maybe I'm just ready at last, but the quick tutorial gave me just enough beyond what I needed to know before (i/r/:wq) to grasp its power. I've tripled my vi knowledge without being intimidated.
- nakkiel 15y agoYears didn't do it but less than 40 minutes (since this was published) got you in. I'm either missing something or you haven't put your time to good use. Try vimtutor in your terminal. It's supposed to take 30 minutes. You'll miss a lot of things from the tutorial the first time but you can come back to it as often as needed. You also shouldn't go any further than the tutorial until everything in it makes sense. Once you're at that point, you'll be autonomous for finding new commands and a happy vim user. I may sound mad but seriously, what's with the a-web-app-for-everything madness?
- mushishi 15y agoThe reason it being on web is that it's a low barrier to try out, and it concentrates on the first steps; in my opinion, systems should provide a gradually progressive way to learn them.
- rafedb 15y agoSounds like someone pissed in your Wheaties this morning. Anything to get more people to give vim/the vim style of doing things a chance is always cool in my book.
- keithpeter 15y agoPoint taken, however I work sometimes in a large open plan office with administered win7 pcs and command prompt disabled. I can use this site to do some practice for a ten minute burst with headphones on just as an 'interaction break'.
- guyht 15y agoThis is a great start point for anyone wanting to learn vim!
- kqr2 15y agoFor those who would like to try emacs in their browser, there is ymacs, a emacs like editor implemented in javascript. It's not specifically a tutorial, but it's good enough to try out the basics. http://www.ymacs.org/demo/ http://www.ymacs.org/demo/
- swah 15y agoIMO this is only justified if downloading the 40mb of emacs is taking a long time :)
- s00pcan 15y agovimtutor was all it took for me and didn't take that long. Yes, it takes about 30 minutes to get through, but I used it off and on as a refresher as I was getting more accustomed to using vim. Here I am half a year later I do almost all of my text editing using GVim. My advice would be to gradually ease into the advanced commands and plugins and not to immediately try and fix every problem you come across where vim doesn't behave like you would expect coming from other editors.
- misterbwong 15y agoI found that vimemu's graphical tutorial cheatsheets were a great, incremental way to get accustomed vim bindings. I can't speak to how accurate they are to the "real" vi/vim, but they've helped me get used to Sublime's vintage mode. There are 7 "lessons". I just printed them out and stuck a new one in front of my keyboard every week or so. http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...
- shurane 15y agoOkay, that is immensely helpful. It would be useful if there was an on-screen keyboard that looked like that for OpenVim.
- ulisesroche 15y agoYou got good at Vim because you used it for over 6 months, not because it had any plugins turned off. A distro like https://github.com/carlhuda/janus https://github.com/carlhuda/janus provides sensible training wheels.
- s00pcan 15y agoI wasn't suggesting not to use any plugins, just to instead use the editor's basic commands first. It is really distracting trying to fix everything at once when you should focus on using the editor.
- AlexC04 15y agoI love the concept but have two gripes. 1) the text "line in" for reading comes in too slow. I want the whole text up on the screen in a flash so I can concentrate on reading. I usually either find I'm faster than the "line in" animation OR the line in is too distracting to read around. 2) with respect to the tutorials, at the end of each section I should have all the new commands "unlocked" so I can `h` `j` `k` `l` until I'm 100% comfortable with what each key does.
- mushishi 15y agoThanks for the feedback. 1) you can press any key to show rest of the text quickly. (not exactly on a flash always) 2) I considered adding a sandbox view on the same page so that user could make herself comfortable but decided against it, as I wanted to keep things simple. So this kind of restricted command set in the actual tutorial might be a nice solution; I haven't done it yet since it makes the flow non-linear; I might make the tutorial more interactive in other aspects, but it needs still thinking. Good point, anyway.
- mattmanser 15y agoNice, despite all the nay saying, it's a good and low barrier intro to what always had me wondering, what's so special about vim and the two modes? Good job.
- mushishi 15y agoI am happy to hear you like it!
- docgnome 15y agoYou mean, why is modal special? Vim has multiple modes to make it easier to perform certain sets of operations. The commands for insertion of text are separated from the command for manipulating the text. It's been years since I've used vim but it certainly does make aspects of a keyboard driven editor easier on the hands than emacs does.
- jayunit 15y agoThe "vim hero" idea you mentioned - similar to this? http://vimgolf.com/ http://vimgolf.com/
- mushishi 15y agoNot exactly but it's one thing that was on the todo list; so now I don't need to implement that :) vimhero would be a single player game for practicing constantly progressing challenges; of course, the idea might just not work.
- scrrr 15y agoI keep triggering vimium (Chrome) commands.. :) But yeah this is nice. I consider myself proficient with vim and use it daily for a year but I'd like to try such a tool for other editors. Say TextMate in Ruby mode or emacs..
- Bo102010 15y agoI had to turn of Firefox's Find As You Type to make it work, but well worth it! I have gone so far as to FTP files to myself to edit on a more familiar editor, then FTP'd them back to the target machine rather than use vi, so it's high time I internalized the basics.
- norswap 15y agoNot everything does work properly with non qwerty keyboards: for instance '0' doesn't work in the sandbox for an be-latin keyboard (tough it works in the tutorial), tough I suppose it doesn't work for every keyboard that need press the maj key to produce a number.
- gbog 15y agoI am now near ten years of daily vim usage, maybe I am not like the others but I still do not use hjkl to move around. I do not think hjkl should be in a first place of an introduction to Vim for coders. Instead, I would explain about / ? * # > < and :s, which are the basic for editing code.
- mushishi 15y agoThanks for the list of commands you find valuable. * and # are supported but not in the tutorial yet.
- cake 15y agoI found it great, except part 2 of the tutorial is kinda missing.