Vim Kata Number One | Hacker News Reader

Vim Kata Number One

blog.wekeroad.com

38 pointsspoon166 comments

I'm working on an Editor Alike Tutorial project.

The idea is to bring about world peace by collaboratively creating a tutorial which can only be coped with using a sufficiently powerful editor. It should look impossible to do in notepad and nano, for example.

One criterion is that the tutorial text not play toward specific features of one or another editor, but toward the proper mindset of an editor as an editor.

Another is that it has to be fun.

Any vim users want to help? Or emacs users disturbed at the recent flurry of vim articles?

There are a few instances of unnecessarily keystrokes in this exercise. Moves to the start of the line for a command that will act on the whole line (0shift-D, 0shift-V, 0dd). The 0's aren't required for those. Also a few times it switches to command mode when the editor is already in command mode based on the last step. 0shift-V2j selects 3 lines, not two.

Is shift-d supposed to effect the whole line? Default 7.2 vim on winxp shift-d goes from the cursor to the end of the line making 0shift-d the correct thing for me to delete a line.

The 3wcw to change a misspelled word is also incorrect(for me at least it should be 03wcw)

You're right, the 0 is required. Now I think about it a little more, if you want to delete all the characters on the line, but not remove the line, then 0shift-D might is good. I tend to do ddO for the same operation.

Cool idea. But consider: if you move around platforms (I use 3 every day) then a uniform experience is actually more productive. Training my nervous system to a set of "katas" that work in precisely 1 environment is not very helpful; in fact just the opposite.

One of the nice things about Vim in particular is that it's incredibly uniform across platforms - far more consistent than Windows keyboard shortcuts versus Mac shortcuts versus Linux shortcuts. Vim's download page is quite... extensive:

    http://www.vim.org/download.php

Another advantage of learning Vi is that since it's been such a popular choice for decades, there's a reasonable chance of a "vi emulation mode" being available in other environments; the Komodo IDE has one built-in I believe, there are third party solutions for Visual Studio, Outlook and Word, even a system-wide Input Manager plugin for OS X.

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