VimGolf.com - real Vim ninjas count every keystroke | Hacker News Reader

VimGolf.com - real Vim ninjas count every keystroke

vimgolf.com

178 pointsigrigorik79 comments

Where are the solutions? That's the fun thing about Perl golf is seeing how people did it in X characters. Without solutions...well, I don't see the point.

I'm logging the solutions, but in real MVP fashion... not showing them just yet. Need to bootstrap a vimscript parser first.

If anyone is up for it, would love some help with the client/parser: https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf

I will take part in this when the solutions are displayed. All the fun is in the solutions. So for me, hiding them kills the whole point of the project. Otherwise it would be lots of fun. Im a long time vim user and love it.

I think Project Euler has a good compromise - you can see (and comment on!) solutions once you've successfully passed some baseline. Then you don't feel like you cheated, but can pick apart their solutions, now that you've already focused on that problem for a while.

I've learned a LOT figuring out how some outstanding PE submissions worked, translating their algorithms to my favorite languages.

MVP meaning 'Most Valuable Player'?

Minimum Viable Product

"Maximum reVivification Potential" gets my vote.

Is the parser for deconstructing the solutions? That'd be a useful feature to have along with the solutions themselves.

Do you really need to do anything super smart with them? Could you at least link to the logged scripts as files? Smarter stuff can come later.

Good news. You can now preview the solutions!

Only one wrinkle: you have to submit your own challenge to see the solutions.

Ex: http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a8bf2b8cb3409320002c4

This awesomeness unexpectedly sucked away half my afternoon. Not really sure whether to be upset about it our not. :)

Only thing is that the key counting doesn't seem to be consistent. :\ Using the command history seems to really, really screw with the counts. I thought it counted up all the characters in the submitted command, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I submitted an 18 for the "Sort and add attributes" challenge, then realized that the text for the new key is longer than that. :\

I'm not really clear on what "counts" as a keypress (shift key? colon for commands? Paste commands? Esc?) and I haven't been able to get any of my "scores" to match up with the count in my head.

All that aside, this is a barrel of fun, and I'm sure these kinks will get worked out.

Also, it would be awesome if I could delete some of my scores. :\ My bogus win and early attempts are cluttering up the leaderboard.

I want to go head to head with someone in match play.

precisely what I was thinking.

DJ Hero has a great feature where after you beat a song, you can "Challenge a friend" and it sends a message to them that says something along the lines of "Steve just scored 200,000 points on $SONG_NAME. Can you do better? OK/CANCEL/ABORT"

The people submitting scores of 4 are probably just adding macros to their .vimrc

OP: can you figure out a way to get vim to not load vimrc?

vim -u NONE

(real Vim ninjas read man pages)

They just fixed that.

This is one of the most wonderfully geeky things I have ever seen. The analogy to golf is exceptionally well-drawn, too! It might be entertaining if you developed the parallel even more, perhaps by adapting some of The Rules of Golf to your project.

Not an original concept here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Perl_golf

'Golfing' different languages has been around for some time.

No discredit to the site though, certainly happy to have Vim golfing join the ranks.

I had an idea for an emacs version of this.

Anyone have any ideas on how you'd implement this with emacs?

My emacs-fu is pretty stale, but I'm sure it has the hooks to track what you need. Although, Emacs isn't all about keystrokes, it's more about interactive coding and an integrated development environment.

Maybe you could do something more along the lines of Perl golf, where you achieve certain things in as little code as possible.

What? Viewing/counting keystrokes? Then "C-h l".

Perhaps Xah Lee's command frequencies script is a start?

You could check keystrokes used with C-h l (or M-x view-lossage), but Emacs's whole design is based on extensibility rather than terse, orthogonal, and (usually) single-key commands. Don't find a clever way to knock it down to 30 keystrokes (or whatever) - when you notice a common operation, script it, name it, bind it, now it's two or three keystrokes.

I held the title on "Brackets or Braces?" [0] for a good seven minutes with a 44 character solution [1], only to be ousted by @ryanmusicman with 42. Can anyone see an obvious way to improve mine?

[0]: http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a522ea860b7447200010b

[1]: https://gist.github.com/757767

A quick thought: use surround.vim plugin for this.

Sadly, that's not allowed :(

Which kind of defeats the purpose. I use Vim plugins to reduce my keystrokes.

I agree that all users rely on plugins for doing real work. However, seeing how much can be accomplished by using just vanilla features can be enlightening.

Ugh.. wanted to play with it, but after three years, there still isn't a simple way to get Ruby and Gems working nicely with modern Ruby apps on OSX. Searching for ways to update show a variety of hacks, each uglier than the last. Of course, I could always build it from source.. ::sigh::

Not sure what you mean, as the vast majority of Ruby developers I know use OS X. Ruby works out of the box on Snow Leopard. Or try Homebrew. Or RVM.

I'm running an MBP received a clean install of the first Snow Leopard release and has subsequently gone through the normal system updates. On this system, and the previous one that was running 10.5, I've never managed to get RubyGems updated successfully.. hence, when I try to gem install vimgolf, it tells me that I need rubygems >=1.3.6. I guess I'm just failing as a hacker and missing something obvious. Grr.

Well, I just discovered that I had two different conflicting gem home dirs. was able to set GEM_HOME and do "gem cleanup" and things seem to be a bit better now. Yay!

Just mercifully ignore OSX-shipped Ruby and go with Ruby from ports, homebrew, vanilla-source install. Or just use RVM.

I use rvm on OSX every day, Ruby would be worse without it.

I'm going to sorely miss it when I start working in other languages again.

Ha, I just started working on the same exact project a few weeks ago. Great minds think alike, I guess. I'm taking a different approach, so I'll still launch it to see what people think.

I brought up this idea in a "gamification of software development" talk I gave last April.

Looks like Tim Pope started playing. He's talking about the "anti cheat" mechanisms on twitter: http://twitter.com/tpope/status/19900265129836544

Until somebody can come up with at least some method of restricting vim scripting, the results are useless(one can easily only use 4 key strokes by key mapping as you can see). But, on the other hand, you can't just disable vim from loading scripts, because there's no point in mastering the plain old vim without any plugins, custom key mappings and such.

I've been trying with editing the file in another editor, then :e! :wq which seems to give 17/18 score mostly.

I love this idea and love the challenge, but would love to make it less hackable as well.

ZZ instead of :wq will knock a letter off. I'm guessing that's what the current leader with 16 is doing on this challenge: http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a1c36567bac34a9000002

You should really make some challenges that require the users to pass multiple tests with the same script. Sure, you can solve the reformat/refactor challenge by

    jd2jVjj=f(ci)*a^]jcfda.join(',')^]

but it wont generalize anywhere. Having a full script though that will detect and do that automagically, now there's the fun part.

    4JD=Gjwci(*a^]jcfda.join(',')^]

God this is addicting. Shaved off a few characters.

edit: switch the first three letters to j3D, as 4JD seems to work differently between my two machines.

This one gives a score of 32, but I like it just for the sheer one-liner obsfucatedness:

  :g/#/+1s/\v(.*)\n.*/\1\r\1

ed golf, eh?

Here's my Flodder Challenge (http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a4f2ba860b744720000bf) solution:

    ~wqave~2wq@aw2@ab~ws**^]l~fe~ww@afg@aZZ

(where ^] is an esc). Currently gets a score of 41 (although I only count 38 keystrokes...)

Only scored a 27 on the 'Reverse characters in a line' challenge...

I was trying to do this:

  :s/./&\r/g|g/^/m0|j!

However, that causes a to be before b for some reason.

So I ended up doing:

  :s/./&\\r/g|g/^/m0\rV}gJ

Anyone know why appending j! joins everything correctly except a and b?

Any tips on improving 'Sort and add attributes'?

I have scored 38 with:

:sor<ENTER>:%s/)/, :country => "USA")/<ENTER>

I think this is the shortest solution unless someone has sort mapped to hot-keys, which is unlikely.

:sor|%s/)/, :country => "USA")<ENTER> works for me

This shaves off a few chars: a) combining the commands b) leaving off the last / in the search/replace

Lets see, for the simple text editing: qa/vim<ENTER>yypjddq@a@a so 18.

qa/v<ENTER>yypjddq@a@a

16 :P

qa/v<ENTER>yypJDq@a@a

Isn't that 19? Shift key...

Nice!

qa/v<ENTER>YpJDq@a@a

Arg, the fact that Y and yy are synonyms always messes me up. Why can't it be like c/C/cc and d/D/dd?

Because then it would be consistent ;-)

Of course I have remapped Y to be consistent with C, D, etc.

If this contest also rated by finger distance (one of vim's strengths), I'd propose qq and @q@@ instead of using the "a" register.

Agreed. I'm surprised by all the "qa"s I'm seeing. I've always used "qq" for quick macros and kind of assumed everyone else did as well. It's especially convenient considering that @ and q are right next to each other on a qwerty layout.

Yeah, how does this prevent somebody from making a macro that does the entire file, then "completing" the file with the two* keystrokes it takes to fire off that macro?

Or one, mapping space to @q is convenient :)

qq3jYpJDq@q@@

Edit: I can trim one more off, to make it 12:

qq3jYpJDq2@q

Awesome! You are currently the winner!

To be fair, I borrowed from a couple others here, but that was generally the approach I had in mind.

Of course, we aren't genuinely doing what the author intended. The point was not to copy-paste the line, but actually to perform what would be rather typical edits. I also was rather lucky that the file happened to be structured such that "3j" put the cursor in the right place each time.

It's also not clear whether or not the three times SHIFT must be pressed ("JD" = push and hold SHIFT = one press) should be counted as additional keystrokes.

The contest would have been better with a "tee" file and a "hole" file, stipulating that edits should be performed on the former in order to produce the latter.

As the scoring currently stands, it doesn't seem to count shift presses. It does count escapes though.

Kinda a bummer for those of us who don't use twitter..

Edit: Still a very cool project though

You can also use Vi for hundreds of challenges at http://golf.shinh.org alot of the newer challenges are stale but some of the older ones are gold.

Different game, that's counting the resulting code that you create. This is counting the number of keystrokes to create the code (for some at least).

Is there anything to stop people form just writing a macro beforehand that does each task? I'm guessing that's how the guy who 4 keystrokes on Simple Text Editing accomplished that.

FizzBuzz: (score: 71)

    i1^]
    qaYp
    CTRL+a
    q98@aggjjqaA Fizz^]
    3jq32@agg:5
    ENTER
    qaA Buzz^]
    5jq19@a:%s/z B/zB/
    ENTER
    ZZ

You don't need the "gg" (move to top) before ":5" (go to line 5)

Right, I'm an idiot. Good catch - likewise the ggjj earlier can just be :3[enter]

3G is better

who voted this down? 3G is obviously 2 key stokes while :3<CR> is 3

You can achieve even less key strokes if you have your vim automatically removes trailing spaces, which is a neat feature itself and a common hack.

autocmd BufWritePre * :%s/\s\+$//

53 is the least I got.

Anyone else having problems signing in? I connected my twitter account but its still thinking I'm not logged in.

Hey! You demo'd this to me at Beer && Code a few weeks ago. Good to see this has come along!

Heh, that was me, and this is actually a completely independent project. Mine's still coming along, and I think it's an improvement.

Unbelievable. I had this exact same idea. Get out of my mind!

Me too. :) This is a much, much nicer implementation than anything I had in mind, though,

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