PacVim – PacVim is a game that teaches you vim commands | Hacker News Reader

PacVim – PacVim is a game that teaches you vim commands

github.com

190 pointssoheilpro37 comments

See lots of people suggesting random things to learn vim, I'll throw one more on. Just run vimtutor in your terminal. I ran through that two times and felt comfortable enough to switch to it

Vim should be learned by blood sweat and tears Or you could just curse the random box you ssh into for not having nano

> Vim should be learned by blood sweat and tears

or learned via nethack.

To be honest, I know vi and emacs, and curse fresh Linux installs for having some weird editor with completely foreign control keys. :) Dunno if it's nano or something else, but it's mildly annoying to me. I tend to just uninstall it rather than muck around with the "alternatives" system.

Try openbsd then.

Default editor is mg, which is basically a micro-emacs reincarnation

The default editor is vi.

Ed is the standard text editor.

True that. But this games some times help you with discoverability. In the sense that, sometimes you might not know if there is a way to do X.

A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17077668

Quite worthwhile: https://vimvalley.com/

I have no connection whatsoever with the author, but VimValley was a great way to get into http://spacemacs.org/

It's worth mentioning that registration is required to access a few trial tutorials with depth akin to vimtutor, then the full course is $99.

And also worth paying, in my opinion.

Worth paying $100 to access a tutorial? When the program itself comes with a tutorial built in? Can you give a quick review of what makes this tutorial worth $100 versus any other free or cheaper tutorial?

There's a lot -- I mean, a lot -- that the built-in Vim tutorial doesn't even try to cover. It was enough to make me feel like I was "good enough" with Vim, even though I rarely used it for editing anything more substantial than git commit messages and config files, and if that's what you want out of Vim it's fine! But I bought the ebook version last month of Practical Vim when the publisher was running a "Christmas in July" sale, and it is kind of mind-blowing. (How did I not know about the ":find" command, and why do I need the ctrlp.vim plugin now that I do?)

As to the question about the $100 tutorial, though, that's... well, a lot, but I suppose it depends on whether "Vim Valley" takes an approach that "clicks" for you in ways other things don't. Practical Vim is $23 for a DRM-free ebook, and it has a lot of hands-on exercises; I learn pretty well that way, I've found.

Exactly. I did the built in tutorial and read a bunch of online info on Vim but never really grokked it for years until I decided to really focus on it for a while. There are a few concepts like talking to Vim like a person (which I included in the free portion of the course) that really helped it click for me.

There's a ton of free info on Vim around and it's perfectly viable to learn it on your own that way, it will just take a lot longer. Obviously I'm biased, since I made Vim Valley to be exactly what I think is the fastest and most enjoyable way to learn Vim.

I never used any such course, and am still proficient in vim. I would not take, or recommend to take, such a course.

10 bucks? i'd give it a go but it's more than most AAA games.... for a tutorial.

Are you sure you have "no connection whatsoever" with them?

Specifically, I was neither encouraged nor shall I receive any compensation for putting that link here.

If you choose to disbelieve me, that is your choice.

I'm the author of the course, thanks for the kind words! This man of impeccable taste does indeed have no connection to me, learned of this comment because I checked referral logs after I was getting a bunch of signups from Hackernews :)

Oh hey that's super helpful, thanks.

Update: The JS on this site frequently crashes on a fully updated Linux Firefox browser. It's neat so I honestly would have paid, but it just freezes up during some of the later exercises.

Hi, I'm the author of the course. Sorry the site isn't cooperating with your browser. I tested it fairly thoroughly on all browsers when I launched it, but that was 3 years ago. It's entirely possible Firefox may have deprecated some of the more obscure JS I used since then.

If you email me the details of the bug(s) you're running into to hello@vimvalley.com I can try to get them fixed. Otherwise if you're not averse to Chrome everything should work fine with Chrome on Linux.

If you have docker installed, you can run it (nearly) instantly with:

     docker run -it --rm freedomben/pacvim

I'd recommend --rm too so that the container is removed afterwards instead of sitting in your `docker ps --all` list.

Yeah definitely. I edited and added it. Thanks!

docker... for a compiled console game that only needs ncurses - what am I missing?

There's very little overhead with docker, and considerable security benefits when running a stranger's code from the internet.

I also find it much easier to `docker run ...` than to clone, install deps, build, and run.

If you would rather compile and run it yourself, that's always an option.

I've gone through a number of tutorials, games, and articles, but I still think the best resource I've found so far is actually a book, "Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought": https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Vim-Edit-Speed-Thought/dp/1... . The book focuses on use cases which is a refreshing approach to Vim.

This is what I used to learn vim https://vim-adventures.com/

Edit: Huh, looks like it doesn't work anymore. :/

It doesn't actually run in Vim though. I imagine a (keybinding-agnostic) Emacs version could be created.

This is interesting, but it really needs a proper release with compiled executables for Windows / Mac OS / Linux! I appreciate there's a Docker option... but it's a game!

"In the map text file, the walls are denoted by ampersands #" That isn't right, isn't it?

Awesome. It would be a great hack to reimplement this in VimScript.

It's 2019 and people are still needing to learn vi. It's not the people, it's vi.

When I see colleagues using their editor of choice, they’re typically only using the basic features. The pro features that significantly speed up your editing flow remain undiscovered.

When I point out a faster way to accomplish a certain thing that is typically found in all editors, which often even is placed behind the same keyboard shortcut, they’re like “oh, that’s cool, I didn’t know you could do that!”. And that’s without me knowing or having used that specific editor.

So I’d say it’s the people, not vi, as it applies just as well to other editors or IDEs.

Vi (or emacs) have steep learning curve with immense benefits for rest of a programmer/editor life.

Why do this game when you can just get woken up on call at 3am with a laptop that you wiped and put Arch on last night for kicks?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com