VIM Master

Learned vim with a game like this. It was a vscode extension, I don’t remember what it was called.

Anyway it’s easily the best time investment I’ve ever made, period. Takes a couple days of messing around, and you can basically never leave modal editing behind! It’s just so much better. I’m still not even a vim master. Just the basic motions and commands are enough to never want to give em up. Throw macros and registers on top… delicious.

Also without vim I never would have tried helix, which is just absolutely the smoothest and most frictionless editing ever. Very minimal setup, too

  > I’m still not even a vim master.

I can do some things that people using vim for decades didn't know was possible. I'm still not a vim master. How does one ascend to the levels of TPope?

Joking aside, I think that's one of the nice things about vim. There's always more to learn. Not in the way that you're missing something but in the same way this is true for any programming language. It's because these tools are so flexible they can do just about anything

Searching for "vim game" this is the only thing I found:

Vscode Vim Academy

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kaisun.v...

Does that look like what you used?

Vim isn't an editor, it's an interactive programming language for text processing.

     :%norm 0f"ldt"i...

There are so many times (even per day) where I'll say to myself: "ahhh, I'll just 'vim' it rather than writing a program..."

If I'm not going to have to do it a bunch, sometimes vim itself is faster than writing a script to do whatever random task I need done.

Try `vim -c`. Or better, in your terminal press <C-x><C-e>

I have also used vim macros to do all sorts of text formatting that would have otherwise taken ages!!

One time my girlfriend needed to format a bunch of text, I don’t remember why. It was like a csv but couldn’t be opened in excel because it was badly formatted or something?

Anyway her work computer had vim on it, and I totally saved the day. Pretty much the proudest moment of my life lol. It was like this xkcd, but for vim https://xkcd.com/208/

ok actually upon closer inspection, the extension was not a game, just a "learn vim" type of thing. I think I got it mixed up with a vim game I found online.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vinthara...

I have that shirt! ;-)

The other day (we're being encouraged to "use AI" at work), I had a bunch of 20250101, 20250201, ... fields in a g-sheet at work. I decide to ask google's AI to "help out", hey... can you convert these integers to ISO date strings?

"Sure can do, old buddy, old, pal, here you go, it's '2025-01-01', '2025-02-01', etc..."

OK, great, can you put those rows into the spreadsheet now? "Whoah whoa... I used python code to do that for you" => "Can you do it with a spreadsheet formula or something? Can you replace those rows? What's the formula to convert this into a string / iso date? ...etc..."

Finally I'm just like "fuck it!", grabbed it in vim, `Ctrl-V, G, I-, ll.` and pasted it all back in. Like 10 keystrokes instead of arguing with our new robot overlords. :-D