Show HN: Vimgolf.ai – Learn Vim by playing through a map of levels

Show HN: Vimgolf.ai – Learn Vim by playing through a map of levels(vimgolf.ai)

17 points by nickandbro 3 hours ago | 16 comments

Just launched my app, VimGolf.ai! As users complete the levels on the map, I introduce progressively more complicated concepts — it’s aimed at people who have never used Vim. Any feedback would be much appreciated!

BoxwoodSeed 1 hour ago |

Uses unholy amounts of CPU making my laptop's fans spin out of control. Editing is very slow, too. Not really a good impression of vim. I'm still going to recommend people to use vimtutor to get used to vim.

nickandbro 1 hour ago | |

Hmm, I’ll look into the CPU processing performance. Maybe it’s the menu animations? And yes vimtutor continues to be a great resource that Braam made. I mainly made this app to gamify learning the vim skills.

VVilhelmsen 1 hour ago |

https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf

I assume you're not the creator of vimgolf so I'll leave this here for source reference

nickandbro 1 hour ago | |

Vimgolf.com is another great way to learn Vim. I created Vimgolf.ai mainly to challenge users by comparing their score against bot entries.

pluc 2 hours ago |

I get a Forbidden white screen in the vim "window" and that's that

nickandbro 1 hour ago | |

Thanks for the feedback! What browser are you using? Sometimes the containers also don’t work properly with certain VPNs.

pluc 1 hour ago | | |

Could be it, Firefox w/ Mullvad on Linux. Gets a 403 on the second /session call, first one is a 302.

nylonstrung 2 hours ago |

Can you add Helix golf support?

nickandbro 1 hour ago | |

I’ll look into it! Definitely worth pursuing

Hugsbox 1 hour ago |

I've wanted something like this for quite a while. I'm such a "basic" vim user, despite the fact that I'm 20 years into it... I do everything in INSERT mode, like a pleb. These might actually help me start using vim as it was intended to be

nickandbro 1 hour ago | |

Thank you so much for your feedback!

Hugsbox 1 hour ago | | |

My only criticism is, could there be a tutorial mode? There's nowhere to actually walk you through any of the steps, the "teaching your cursor to walk" thing doesn't, to my knowledge, actually teach you - you have to figure it out for yourself, it just tells you how much worse you did than the bot.

NewsaHackO 1 hour ago |

The amount of free trial subscription slop SaaS software has really gotten out of control. The gall people have to attempt to sell a subscription to something like this is something else.

nickandbro 1 hour ago | |

My app is actually cheaper than vim-adventures or other popular paid Vim learning sites. If you are against using my app, I encourage you to use vimtutor. A great free way to learn Vim.