Show HN: I built a web app for learning Vim from the browser as a 17-year-old

Don’t let people dissuade you from charging. I think your site looks great. I think the exercise of setting up a payment system is worth it.

It did ask me to connect using google. I bailed there since I don’t really want to connect my google account to random things.

I’m not actually wanting to learn vim. I know it enough to do whatever I need while ssh’d into random machine. But I do want to encourage you to keep building stuff!

What if it was email password? Would you prefer that?

Isn't this a forum founded by a venture capitalist/startup guy? I don't understand why you have an issue with someone charging money for something they made.

Speaking as a person who learned the basics of Vim from vimtutor, a friendly UI can reduce friction. Newer interfaces can also teach very useful commands at the start, making navigation much easier.

I was moderately curious about Vim but didn't really need to use the tool, but eventually after many months, I got curious enough to start and complete vimtutor. The introduction to vimtutor says it should take 30 minutes, but it took me 1.5-2 hours over two days while also making notes after the exercises to better remember the lessons (in my case, my approach to vimtutor worked, as I use Vim nearly every day for personal notes to keep practicing).

However, I put off vimtutor for months because it looked like work. While completing vimtutor, the process of completion also felt like work. A more friendly UI like the submitted article can help people easily get started and increase completion rates, which makes it easier to pick up the skill.

I didn't check if the submitted article does this, but newer interactive Vim tutor projects can also teach commands that I believe are essential to reducing the friction of using Vim. For example, throughout vimtutor I spammed jjjjjj to get down and did the same with k to go up, but only later found out that Ctrl+B & Ctrl+F (go back or forward a half-screen) or Ctrl+U & Ctrl+D (go up or down a full screen) were far easier ways to scroll, or at least 4k or 4j (four lines up or four lines down). This makes Vim much more pleasant to use, and makes it far easier to navigate through a file.

Still, I agree that vimtutor is great as it's free and in the console, but is room to make the introduction more friendly. $15 seems pretty steep, though, especially as there are other free alternatives out there to make it easier to learn Vim (at the very least, video tutorials and written guides).

I wish this was available for people who are not 17 years old.