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Learning VIM while playing a game
- stoolpigeon 14y agovery cool
- Produce 14y agoIncredibly slow here. Ubuntu 11.04, FireFox 11, intel graphics, 4GB RAM, Core 2 Duo E7300.
- shock 14y agoWorks very well here: Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit, FF Aurora 13.0a2 (2012-04-23), nVidia 295.20, 4GB RAM, Core2Duo E6600
- Produce 14y agoMust be the graphics card then.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- schorsch 14y agoSame here: Ubuntu 11.10, 2 GB Ram, Core 2 Duo T7200, Nvidia Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300. It's awfully slow and thus unplayable. :(
- ing33k 14y agoawesome, I am learning vim since a week and this is definitely very useful.
- ColinWright 14y agoNothing works for me - what's the minimum browser/OS requirement?
- SquareWheel 14y agoRan fine for me on Chrome Stable/Windows 7, running 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, 3GB ram, on-board video.
- adito 14y agofine in Chromium 18.0.1025.142 Ubuntu 11.10
- PedroDiogo_ 14y agoGreat little game! I never imagined a game would be so effective to get you to learn hjkl, but makes sense, most people learn wasd by playing games too. I'm using a Macbook Air with Mac OS X Lion and Google Chrome and the gameplay is very smooth.
- pyriku 14y agoThey could do something like this one for Emacs. Wait, it already exists: it's called Guitar Hero.
- DEinspanjer 14y agoI fear you might have just caused that thing to spring into life.. I only hope that it wasn't actually rule 34 that triggered it.
- orta 14y agoworks great for me! Safari 5 Mountain Lion The email address box however didn't show my email as I typed it in
- readme 14y agoAfter finishing the maze there is a roadblock at the bottom of the screen after talking to the girl who tells me about what happens if I step into water and there is no column above me... Is there a game beyond there?
- henrikgs 14y agoNo it's not over, use what you learned from her to advance in the game
- readme 14y agoJust made it past that. Thanks.
- thristian 14y agoIt's a puzzle. You're only half-way through the first level.
- xymostech 14y agoI already know vim keybindings and this part stumped me for a little bit. I think that, while the rest of the tutorial makes sense without listening to the people, this is the only part where it isn't obvious from the environment what you're supposed to do. Just a thought.
- farico 14y agohas a bug with option "start searching when I start" enabled on firefox, clicking cursor keys makes firefox open up quick search and the game becomes unplayable unless you keep clicking escape after every other button click. The game looks fine! I already see how my kids will learn vim :)
- vog 14y agoCongratulations to that very nice and useful game! I loved to play around with the first 2 levels. It's a pity that the project's state is totally unclear (at least to me, a casual visitor). Is it meant to become a community project? Is it a demo of something that will be sold in the future? The explaining text behind the "Unlock Levels" button adds even more confusion: > Additional levels are currently being developed for you to play and enjoy. The 3rd level will be available for FREE only for players who sign up for my email list. Sign up now! You'll be notified as soon as the level is up. The level won't be available for unregistered users. On the one hand, it sounds as if it is free, with some "forcing" to make more users join the project mailing list. On the other hand, this is totally discouraging contributions (because you aren't allowed to see the work-in-progress version), so maybe it's meant to become for-sale in the future. I'd love to see it developing either way (although I think the community way is the more appropriate for this project). But as of now, it seems to unify the disadvantages of both worlds: Advertising the mailing list in a way that appeals neither to people who are willing to pay (as there's no clear pricing plan), nor to people interested in contributing (as it seems to more about announcements/"newsletters" than about how to improve and to help).
- pervycreeper 14y agoNot to mention that this all goes against free software values, in a game that touts "the power of open source".
- chappi42 14y agoBad argument imho. There are e.g. vim books or peepcode casts. Why shouldn't there be a game where you have to pay? Only it should be mentioned clearly.
- Sumaso 14y agoOpen Source != Free Software
- vog 14y agoAlthough I agree that both terms are not exactly equal as they emphasize different aspects, those differences are totally irrelevant to the argument at hand: If you advertise your project by stating you are convinced of the "power of Open Source", but don't make use of that "power", how much credible is that? No matter if you find this argument convincing or not, it has nothing to do with the difference between Open Source and Free Software. It's just about adverticing a proprietary project with "power of Open Source" versus advertising it with, say, "power of Vim".
- giis 14y agocool :P I really liked it.
- Jimbotron 14y agoWas silky smooth for me on a Mac Core 2 Duo & Chrome. Nice game and looking forward to more levels!
- daniel_sim 14y agoThis is excellent! I really feel some of this sticking in my memory for once. Thanks.
- s00pcan 14y agoCouldn't move at first, then I realized I had to disable the vimperator plugin. Cool game though!
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoCtrl-Z (passthrough keys to website) worked for me in Pentadactyl (and I assume Vimperator).
- m0tive 14y agoI think `Insert` does the same thing in Vimperator
- rfzabick 14y agoheh. I had troubles too. I switched to chrome, where I don't have the plugin.
- lucian1900 14y agoVery slow on my Firefox 11, Ubuntu 11.10, fglrx
- lwm 14y agoFantastic! This game had me laughing instantly...gaining a proficiency in 'hjkl' via a crazy web browser game is a great idea!
- drostie 14y agoOn a side note, several times when playing through the game I noticed that my motions weren't working, and traced it back to this: that for me, the home row is jkl; and not hjkl. I don't know very much about vim -- is there a reason that you have to put your hand in the "wrong place" on the keyboard?
- tverlinden 14y agovi, which vim is based on, was programmed on the ADM-3A terminal, where the arrow keys are on the H, J, K, and L keys. http://www.catonmat.net/images/why-vim-uses-hjkl/lsi-adm-3a.jpg http://www.catonmat.net/images/why-vim-uses-hjkl/lsi-adm-3a.... http://www.catonmat.net/images/why-vim-uses-hjkl/adm-3a-hjkl-keyboard.jpg http://www.catonmat.net/images/why-vim-uses-hjkl/adm-3a-hjkl...
- drostie 14y agoAh. So it's a sort of Big Software Syndrome type thing -- "we could do it in a more intuitive way for new people, but it would break all of these existing programmers who learned it the less intuitive way, so let's leave it the original way" -- or am I missing something?
- alphabethos 14y agoThat may have something to do with it, but in practice, I find myself moving up/down (j/k) files far more often than I need to backtrack by a single character, and when I do, as often as not my pinky flies up to backspace (note this works by default only in Vim). It ends up being the most natural to keep your hands on the home row anyway.
- graywh 14y ago
- lell 14y agoNice! I got bored before I finished the first level, but not before I was trying to use stuff like ^,$ and ctrl+f, ctrl+b, 5l to get to the end of the tunnels faster and those didn't work. Is more advanced editing unlocked in later levels? or is this just for getting off the arrow keys? I can imagine some cool things in a more advanced vim game like * for teleporting between words, mm to drop a bookmark, :badd to get to a new level ...
- jbri 14y agoIt starts out very slow - the second level introduces w, e and b. That seems to be it so far.
- doronlinder 14y agoThe target of the first level was to cover hjkl. I know it's a pain and when you're proficient enough you usually don't use them but use tf*#/ and such, but it's the basics... The motions are working only on text areas (There are some on the 2nd level). Bookmarks are indeed planned for teleporting back to places, and I have plans for /Hello if you look at the first screen ;)
- dan_b 14y agoVery cool - got an SMTP error when I tried to sign up though. :(
- nitinmartolia 14y agoworks very slow in firefox .. had to play in chrome.
- DEinspanjer 14y agoWorks wonderfully in later versions of Firefox, sounds like there might be a canvas bug causing poor performance in Fx 11
- talos 14y agocrashed ("oh snap") in maze just a few seconds in, chrome 18.0.1025.163, mac os x 10.7.3
- talos 14y agono crash on safari, but SMTP error on email form.
- philluminati 14y agoI've gotten to the end of the level. Then I remembered that in the top corner of the Maze is another treasure chest. I go back there to the !! marks and type b but cannot enter that area. The message reads "Remember: these are not words"... so how do I get in there? Can that part of the game not be solved? I've tried Shift-B, ^ etc. Is anyone else able to get into there?
- zzleeper 14y agoIts only one word... fucking.. so what you need to do is press E from the F
- eridius 14y agoWrong spot. He's asking about the chest in the maze, where it said "Remember: words are not WORDS !!"
- doronlinder 14y agoNice catch! Actually, that's one of the places where a B would come in handy, but it's only collected in level 3 so the chest can't be accessed yet :)
- abbyroad9191 14y agodoesnt work on my iphone 4. is this the future of cross browser compatibility? it's an interesting project none the less.
- doronlinder 14y agoIt wasn't meant to work on mobile devices. It can and everything work as expected besides the fact that you must have a fully functional keyboard to use it and learn VIM.
- beastman82 14y agoMy only recommendation to learn vim is vim tutor. Slightly tedious, but fast and effective.
- Sumaso 14y ago"...Slightly tedious..." This is core problem with learning VIM, many people are off-put by VIMs complexity. I think this game does a great job of letting the player explore vim commands, while complete objectives that are common to many video games. What makes this game great isn't the fact that it's a video game that lets you learn VIM as you play. It's that it simply incorporates VIM commands into a game that could appear on any popular flash game site. Very well done, keep up the good work.
- 54mf 14y agoWow. I've been aching to learn Vim for years, struggling through the rare occasions I have to use it while SSHing in to a machine. I've picked up more in 5 minutes with this game then I have in all that time. Very impressive!
- steve8918 14y agoI learned how to use the controls of VI decades before I actually learned that VIM existed, through Hack/Nethack. I thought the controls were ridiculous, but I was a kid, so I just accepted it and learned them, little did I know how useful they would become later on in life.
- tibbon 14y agoHow close are the controls? I never noticed they were similar... maybe I should try to ascend again, as I'm terrible in VI
- fnaticshank 14y agoCongratulations ! it was a very cool game.. hope we see the next levels soon and I also hope you'd open all the game levels even to unregistered users later. :D
- tubbo 14y agoi wanna use vim less now :D
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tomkin 14y agoWow. This is absolutely genius. You want to be more productive with vim, but this is generally due to the fact that you have little time as it is. Learning vim hasn't always been in the best interests of my current task. Then there is this game. Brilliant.
- doronlinder 14y agoThanks! I'm at a loss for words. It's very kind of you.
- tomkin 14y agoYou deserve it. You put a lot of work and effort into essentially helping people learn, which makes people's life easier.
- ominous 14y agoThank you for this. I have been putting off learning vim for way too long. Nano does its job fine :P However, I can't input my email.. it has more than 30 chars. As per source: <li><input id="email" name="email" maxlength="30" type="text" placeholder="Email Address" /></li>
- DEinspanjer 14y agoSame here, but then even when I tried a shorter name, it gave me an SMTP error. :(
- doronlinder 14y agoI fixed the 30 characters issue to allow up to 70 characters. And you may also use + signs in emails. The SMTP error doesn't occur anymore, and even when there was an error the email was still subscribed so no need to resubscribe again.
- tibbon 14y agoChrome 19.0.1084.30 beta on OS X Lion is seeing nothing past the first screen for me. I hear sounds, but its a black box otherwise.
- fjarlq 14y agoI'm running that exact config and it worked for me.
- jamesrcole 14y agoSimilar for me. Chrome 18.0.1025.151, Mac OS 10.6.8. I see the 'exit' sign and the music volume icons, but the screen is otherwise blank.
- doronlinder 14y agoThe only reason I can think of is that the browser didn't download the images from the server due to extream load on the server. I'm experiencing some server problems and opened a support ticket with my hosting company. If the problem persists, please contact me at doron ( at ) vim - adventures. com and I'd try to get to the bottom of it. Thanks.
- toomanysecrets 14y agoI don't use hjkl to move around in vim. At this point it's counter intuitive. Lame
- darklajid 14y agoThe last word of your comment made me respond.. That'd be considered 'wrong' or missing out. Which the game tries to correct. Supposedly later levels will teach you about vim 'words' and you'll combine hjkl with lots of other commands. You cannot do that the way you use the software. How's that 'lame'? And what kind of an attitude is this if you click on a game that is supposed to teach you about vim and complain that it's forcing you to learn something right afterwards?
- toomanysecrets 14y ago"Cursor keys are not the way to move around in VIM" That's why it's lame. You most certainly CAN. I don't care that other functions combine with hjkl in vim. They're useful but using hjkl for left/right/up/down is annoying and the restriction in this "tutorial" makes it that much worse.
- elliottcarlson 14y agoYes, you can, but there is a benefit to maintaining your fingers on the home row and not requiring a shift elsewhere. So while it might be an annoyance to you, other people disagree.
- Natsu 14y agoYou're better off going through the pain of learning the hard way. It's like cheating and looking at your hands when learning to type. You'll never really learn to type properly and it slows you down a lot. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it right. I wouldn't be able to hit 80 WPM if I had to stare at my hands.
- gdsf34dfsg 14y agoJust use textmate. Lots of us love vim.
- jentulman 14y agoI really like this, and if the price isn't too bad I'll pay to keep going as I've learn't more from this than when I've sat down to try to 'learn to do VIM'. I guess there's only so much you can cover in this sort of game format (I'm doubting there will be a .vimrc level), but if it goes far enough to teach me to take all the lag out of navigating and editing, I'll be a happy bunny.
- doronlinder 14y agoThanks. I agree that a .vimrc level will be a stretch. I had some ideas on how to incorporate that to, but I think I'll leave it out. Once you get modal editing and know all necessary commands, motions, and operators to use, tweaking your .vimrc is a walk in the park (with a left turn on google street :) )
- GGNH 14y agoThis is exactly what I need as a beginning front end developer. Thanks so much guys, this rocks.
- jlongster 14y agoThis is great! I've been meaning to learn the basic VIM keybindings so I can start using evil-mode in Emacs: https://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home https://gitorious.org/evil/pages/Home
- brown9-2 14y agoVery interesting idea, but something seems to be off with the email signup - it reports "Error: SMTP Error: Data not accepted. Mail could not be sent." for two addresses I tried, one of them @gmail.com. However when I try to sign up a second time a minute later with the same address, it reports "Email address is already on the list".
- jeremydavid 14y agoI received the same error.
- jeremydavid 14y agoI received the same error.
- randall 14y agoLikewise.
- doronlinder 14y agoThank you very much for mentioning my site here! The problem with the email signup is that I exceeded the maximum 500 mails that google outgoing mail server allows per day (500). All emails are entered to the list first, even if the confirmation mail isn't sent. I'm working on setting up an outgoing smtp server so I'll be able to send more mails. At this point gmail won't even allow me to email from my account. As soon as I have an outgoing mail server I'll send the mail again for anyone who subscribed. So if you get a message that your email is already on the list, everything is ok and I'll send you the thank you email in the next couple of days. The third level, once it's up, will be open to you. Thanks for everyone who pointed that up and sent me emails about that.
- overshard 14y agoI already know VIM/use it on a daily basis and I found this fun and interseting.
- jachwe 14y agohad a lot of fun until it crashes the chrome tab. (like everytime)
- gshakir 14y agoIt crashed chrome!!..:)
- veyron 14y agoI wish this worked on iPad ...
- jMyles 14y agoAre the two NPC's at the very beginning supposed to say nothing? I see a blank speech bubble when I walk to them.
- randall 14y agoThis is awesome!
- com2kid 14y agoIt keeps crashing Firefox. I am sort of wondering what in the world it is doing to manage to kill both Firefox and Chrome! Aside from that, it was not immediately obvious what W and B did, though a few seconds of playing around and it made sense. (That is about how far I got before it died the second time)
- doronlinder 14y agoI managed to crash chrome once, but couldn't reproduce it. I'm an indie developer so I don't have enough people QAing the product yet :/ My first gut feeling is the audio, but didn't have a chance to prove it yet. It would be great if you'll be able to send me more info on when exactly it crashed to my mail doron ( at ) vim - adventures . com . Other than audio, I really don't do anything out of the ordinary - all javascript and canvas. Regarding the w and b (and e), I left out the exact explanation since I believe that the self exploring and understanding contributes to the learning process. That part was intentional. Thanks for your feedback! I'll make another effort to reproduce the crashes.
- connor 14y agoPretty cool, just that sad smtp error at the end.
- bejar37 14y agoAa
- meglory 14y agowhy the site isn't responding?
- donniezazen 14y agoI am learning VIM. Do you exclusively use VIM for both simple text editing and programming?
- aliukani 14y agoI use it for grading assignments (reading a .lisp file and writing a grade.txt file), as well as taking class notes. I also use it for editing config files (like for nginx) and dotfiles.
- donniezazen 14y agoTaking class notes sound interesting. I want to move some of my stuff over to command-line like TODO and simple writing for distraction free environment. I am using Google Docs and Evernote at the moment but a combination of vim/terminal and Dropbox would be great.
- heydonovan 14y agoJust wanted to express my gratitude for creating such a game. It was a little saddening when I completed it though, as I really wanted to play more of it. Good job! I'm really looking forward to playing more levels. Do you have any plans for allowing others to contribute to level design or game mechanics?
- JoshTriplett 14y agoCute, but the inability to use keys before "collecting" them makes it painful to use as an experienced vim user. I'd love to have a mode that just unlocks all the navigation keys immediately. That would allow users to fly through the early levels, and then get slowed down by the first thing they don't know. I found it particularly clever how the game forces you to use better navigation, by allowing you to skip over rocks that way. Also, teaching capital HJKL early on seems like a good way to make it through the maze more easily; hitting the same key repeatedly (or rather, leaning on it until hitting a wall) seems like a bad habit to teach.
- mikek 14y agohttp://strategywiki.org/wiki/NetHack/Beginning#vi_keys http://strategywiki.org/wiki/NetHack/Beginning#vi_keys
- ehsanu1 14y agoI've had this idea forever, but wanted to make it work in the as a terminal-based application. Being a noob a systems programming, I got stuck at getting a PTY working in C that would properly forward the escape sequences from vim to the player's terminal. I wanted to just create a program that was simply a layer between the terminal and vim, so all the power of vim was automatically available. The game was going to involve manipulating the environment (made of text) to different goals. I had all sorts of minigames in my head. Unfortunately, way too ambitious, and I never even properly started it. This makes me really want to though, if only I had more time..
- lotusblues 14y agogreat! i can move around with h, j, k, l ..... so what now? nothing happens then i time out and get sent back to little person blocking the bridge. is it my browser, ie firefox?
- mgogov 14y agoThis is soooooo cool (:
- altryne 14y agoAwesome game! @doronlinder you should really put a "retweet" button there asap!
- awef 14y agoI thought of this a few months back, glad to see it being done in such a polished manner! Looking forward to play more levels.