6 ms·

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

by jfabre 13y 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.

johncoltrane 13y 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.
- klibertp 13y ago
  Whoever downvoted this guy was wrong. hjkl are useless. I gained vim proficiency through a few years of using it. Funny thing is that I never, ever used these keys for navigation: at the beginning I mapped arrows to them and later I just stopped using them altogether, outside of a few rare cases like block selection. Commands for moving around are listed here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Moving_around http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Moving_around. Note the profound lack of any of h, j, k, l :)
  - gnosis 13y ago
    Wait. You don't use hjkl and you also don't use the arrow keys anymore. So how would you, say, move left one character? Most experienced vim users consider movement using the hjkl keys to be essential to the efficient use of vim. Some even go so far as to recommend unmapping the arrow keys altogether. As someone who's used vim for about 20 years, I have to agree with them. If you don't use the hjkl keys for movement, you're almost certainly making your editing experience less efficient and more painful than it would be if you just buckled down and learned them. There's a very good reason for keeping the most-used movement keys on the home row: you don't have to move your fingers off the home row to use them. Arrow keys and virtually all other motion keys are less efficient for this reason. The more you have to move your hands and fingers, the less efficient your movement will be. Moving your hand back and forth to the arrow keys might not seem so much, but over time it adds up. The truth is that becoming comfortable with the hjkl keys is no more difficult or unpleasant than playing nethack for a little while. You'll find yourself becoming an hjkl master in no time.
    - johncoltrane 13y ago
      It sounds like you completely missed the parent's and my point. hjkl are only marginally better than the arrows: kkkk is just as silly as <up><up><up><up> and their only benefit is in not moving the right hand to the arrow keys at the beginning and end of the sequence. Other than that hitting k 4 times to move the cursor 4 lines above doesn't offer much that the arrows don't. 4k is obviously better but yeah, it also works with the arrows so even there, the benefit is not that great. what is better than both the arrows and hjkl, though, is all the other motions provided by Vim: wWbBeE/?{}fFtT and so on. hjkl are really the tree that hides the forest and focusing one's effort on learning them is almost pointless.
      - gnosis 13y ago
        The other movement commands you mention aren't "better" than the hjkl keys. They are very useful, but accomplish different things. For example, the h key moves one character left. Those other movement keys aren't going to do that for you except in special circumstances. That said, no one is suggesting that in vim the only movement keys one should use are hjkl. Those other movement keys you mention are also very important, and you definitely should learn them after mastering hjkl. As for the arrow keys, the sooner you break free of that crutch, the better. You will find your editing efficiency improves immensely when you are able to keep your fingers mostly on the home row. It's like the difference between touch typing vs hunt and peck typing. Some people are actually quite fast hunt and peck typers. But a touch typist will feel nothing but pity for all the energy they waste hunting and pecking when they could be comfortably and leisurely typing by touch. There are some limited uses cases for the arrow keys in vim, however; such as occasional one-handed browsing with the arrow keys and page-up/page-down keys, which are conveniently close together on many US keyboards. (Don't mistake this use case for movement while editing, which is very different from simply browsing through a document.) I've also known of people who use their arrow keys for accomplishing tasks such as resizing windows, which is a reasonable use case because it's generally done infrequently enough for the extra hand motion not to matter.
        johncoltrane 13y ago
- shabble 13y ago
  If you want to beat yourself out of using them (or /gasp/, arrow keys) instead of more appropriate commands, (and can afford the productivity hit and fits of rage when starting off), try using medium-mode[1] (or, if you're really silly, hard-mode[2]) [1] https://github.com/kbarrette/mediummode https://github.com/kbarrette/mediummode [2] https://github.com/wikitopian/hardmode https://github.com/wikitopian/hardmode

by jfabre 13y ago

johncoltrane 13y 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.

klibertp 13y ago
Whoever downvoted this guy was wrong. hjkl are useless. I gained vim proficiency through a few years of using it. Funny thing is that I never, ever used these keys for navigation: at the beginning I mapped arrows to them and later I just stopped using them altogether, outside of a few rare cases like block selection. Commands for moving around are listed here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Moving_around http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Moving_around. Note the profound lack of any of h, j, k, l :)
- gnosis 13y ago
  Wait. You don't use hjkl and you also don't use the arrow keys anymore. So how would you, say, move left one character? Most experienced vim users consider movement using the hjkl keys to be essential to the efficient use of vim. Some even go so far as to recommend unmapping the arrow keys altogether. As someone who's used vim for about 20 years, I have to agree with them. If you don't use the hjkl keys for movement, you're almost certainly making your editing experience less efficient and more painful than it would be if you just buckled down and learned them. There's a very good reason for keeping the most-used movement keys on the home row: you don't have to move your fingers off the home row to use them. Arrow keys and virtually all other motion keys are less efficient for this reason. The more you have to move your hands and fingers, the less efficient your movement will be. Moving your hand back and forth to the arrow keys might not seem so much, but over time it adds up. The truth is that becoming comfortable with the hjkl keys is no more difficult or unpleasant than playing nethack for a little while. You'll find yourself becoming an hjkl master in no time.
  - johncoltrane 13y ago
    It sounds like you completely missed the parent's and my point. hjkl are only marginally better than the arrows: kkkk is just as silly as <up><up><up><up> and their only benefit is in not moving the right hand to the arrow keys at the beginning and end of the sequence. Other than that hitting k 4 times to move the cursor 4 lines above doesn't offer much that the arrows don't. 4k is obviously better but yeah, it also works with the arrows so even there, the benefit is not that great. what is better than both the arrows and hjkl, though, is all the other motions provided by Vim: wWbBeE/?{}fFtT and so on. hjkl are really the tree that hides the forest and focusing one's effort on learning them is almost pointless.
    - gnosis 13y ago
      The other movement commands you mention aren't "better" than the hjkl keys. They are very useful, but accomplish different things. For example, the h key moves one character left. Those other movement keys aren't going to do that for you except in special circumstances. That said, no one is suggesting that in vim the only movement keys one should use are hjkl. Those other movement keys you mention are also very important, and you definitely should learn them after mastering hjkl. As for the arrow keys, the sooner you break free of that crutch, the better. You will find your editing efficiency improves immensely when you are able to keep your fingers mostly on the home row. It's like the difference between touch typing vs hunt and peck typing. Some people are actually quite fast hunt and peck typers. But a touch typist will feel nothing but pity for all the energy they waste hunting and pecking when they could be comfortably and leisurely typing by touch. There are some limited uses cases for the arrow keys in vim, however; such as occasional one-handed browsing with the arrow keys and page-up/page-down keys, which are conveniently close together on many US keyboards. (Don't mistake this use case for movement while editing, which is very different from simply browsing through a document.) I've also known of people who use their arrow keys for accomplishing tasks such as resizing windows, which is a reasonable use case because it's generally done infrequently enough for the extra hand motion not to matter.
      - johncoltrane 13y ago
shabble 13y ago
If you want to beat yourself out of using them (or /gasp/, arrow keys) instead of more appropriate commands, (and can afford the productivity hit and fits of rage when starting off), try using medium-mode[1] (or, if you're really silly, hard-mode[2]) [1] https://github.com/kbarrette/mediummode https://github.com/kbarrette/mediummode [2] https://github.com/wikitopian/hardmode https://github.com/wikitopian/hardmode