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It's amazing how fast one can edit text with vi once you get all the keys down. There used to be a video game that taught how to use VI. Is it still around?

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> There used to be a video game that taught how to use VI. Is it still around?

You're probably referring to https://vim-adventures.com/.

Some things seem unnecessarily unintuitive to me about the shortcuts. For instance, using 4 in-line keys for navigating a 2D space seems like a wasted opportunity. Every video game ever came to the conclusion that the inverse-T layout is ideal for this task.

I mean, putting all they keys in the home row is admirable but the up/down placement seems so counter-intuitive! Almost everywhere I see arrow keys put in a line up comes first…

^H in ASCII is backspace (move carriage to the left), and ^J is linefeed (move carriage down), so h-j were completely intuitive to people who already knew ASCII (i.e. everybody) and then it just makes sense to continue the row of other cursor movements.

"intuitive" doesn't mean "I was born knowing it"

vi was written long before any video game ever, and the arrow keys on the ADM-3A terminal that Bill Joy used in 1976 were actually on the hjkl keys, so it made sense at the time.

https://catonmat.net/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys

Interesting! I can imagine it would be quite a bit more intuitive with the arrows written there. It almost makes it seem like the touted benefit of having these keys on the home row is essentially ad-hoc reasoning, and maybe this 35-year-old design decision should be re-visited since even keyboard manufacturers realized this was not the best system decades ago.

Just don't use h and l, really. There are a lot of ways to travel horizontally in vim. The fact that up/down are besides each other is really awesome, since that is the movement you will be doing most of the time.

> For instance, using 4 in-line keys for navigating a 2D space seems like a wasted opportunity.

It's actually awesome because your fingers are all on one row. It feels extremely intuitive after a while.

I don't know, I mean I believe you can learn anything and it will seem intuitive after a while, but I feel like more video-game speed runners and e-sport athletes would map their movement controls to the home row if this was really an advantage.

> It's amazing how fast one can edit text with vi once you get all the keys down

People say this, but I feel the same about VSCode. Once you know a few shortcuts (esp. the multi-select and multi-cursor shortcuts), you can make incredibly powerful bulk changes to a file.

I wish there were a subreddit called "TextEditorWars" or something where a challenge is given, and you can submit a screen capture of you accomplishing the challenge as fast as possible in your editor of choice.

Checkout vim golf if you are curious about its possibilities.

Rogue! (Well, and Hack.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

There are other great vi-inspired games, my favourite is Word War Vi ...

http://wordwarvi.sourceforge.net

:wq!

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