Vim Tutorial as an Adventure Game
It's great until you realize it costs $50. A year.
Haha, this is hard to play with cVim bindings on Chrome. An insert mode inside an insert mode.
"If it is possible to gamify so seemingly boring things as learning keyboard shortcuts, then sky's the limit!" from https://github.com/stared/science-based-games-list#bonus
can't say i'm a fan... i found the best way to learn to use vim is to force yourself to use it in an everyday environment. that means at work, where you need to get stuff done. and it will suck and hurt but it works. jump in the water and you will learn to swim. i wanted to quit around a dozen times but i stuck through it. sometimes i would copy and paste using the cursor and clicking so i could move forward, that's fine. you have to learn little things at a time. in 6 months i found i was fluent enough to get my normal work done with ease. 10 years later i love every movement of it and am still learning new things everyday... what an amazing editor...
Hey! This thread keeps popping up! Yay :D
In another thread someone recommended me vimtutor isntead of this game. I played both, and for learning I like vimtutor much more.
To people who don't know vimtutor allow me to explain :)
Vim Adventures still gave me the feeling that vim takes 5+ years to learn and you need to be crazy dedicated and good to understand vim. That's not the fault of Vim Adventures, that's the fault of the folklore that surrounds vim (e.g. http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads... )
30 minutes of vimtutor and I felt that I had "basic vim skills" and that I "could manage myself in a vim editor." I thought it would take 2 years to get these skills. In other words, if you feel you have realistic expectations about how hard it is to learn vim, try vimtutor!
That said this is a fun game!
Some older threads had many comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250190
I remember playing the first few levels of this game when I was still new and starting to learn vim. It marked my first foray into programming as it was a requirement for my basic programming module, so vim tutor was quite intimidating back then (huge wall of text). I believe I stopped using vim adventures when I found out about the paywall.
However, googling about vim had convinced me that it was this awesome piece of ancient software that was somehow better than modern editors, so I stuck with it. I ended up doing my assignments in vim starting with only the hjkl/<Esc>/i keys. Then whenever I wanted to do some shortcut I thought vim might be able to do I just googled it, got my mind blown, then internalised it. Or reading up on articles talking about the must-know vim shortcuts.
This is a great tutorial. Most people point out that most of this is in `vimtutor`, but I found this easier to consume.
That said, I got stuck when I had to learn how to switch buffers. I don't know if I missed a description with how to do it, or if it was missing.
I just started and I can't seem to get to the treasure chest. Sigh, am I that dumb?
I remembered playing this in 2013 and it really helped me learning vim. Then I discovered roguelike games, which depend heavily on vim key bindings, especially hjkl for movements, played a bunch of them ever since and got really fluent in vim keybindings. Now besides using vim as text editor and play roguelikes, I have vimfx extension for browsing web under Firefox and vimium for Chrome. Now I just hope I can have vim editing functionalities in any text boxes, and I have been searching for a solution for years.
This inspired me to try harder with my learning of VIM: https://vimebook.com
I found I learned more faster just using vimtutor, although the idea of learning Vim through a graphical game is still pretty neat.
I have been a IDE guy for years. But here at work everyone uses vim, so I gave it a try. I tried to set up the thing, and gave up shortly after that. Then tried SpaceVim, which was too clunky for my taste (I am sure it will improve, it's a rather recent project). So migrated to Spacemacs, which surprisingly supports vim style commands well.
For anyone that continued past the paywall, is it worth it?
I started this game back when I was in college but stopped at the paywall because I didn't have the money at the time. Forgot about it till just now! If this can teach more advanced vim concepts via gameplay then I'd probably be open to buying it now than I used to be.
I tried this when it was first created. After 30 minutes of fighting with foreign key bindings I realized I can't stand vim even in the context of a game.
So yes, this game is the reason I will always be an emacs person...
I'll save my $25 for some time when I'll be not too busy to play all the way through. So, maybe at Christmas (if I even remember).
Let's say I want to learn an editor in and out, is it worth to learn Vim now or should I invest my time in Sublime?
This is really cool!
this is excellent.
I finished VIM adventures a few years ago and found this approach quite helpful to improve my VIM muscle memory.
What's very unfortunate though is that the licenses are limited to 6 months. Occasionally I wish I could go back to one of the levels focusing on a specific feature, but paying another $25 every time just seems excessive.