Show HN: Zsweep – Play Minesweeper using only Vim motions • Hacker News Board

johnhamlin wrote: post #16

Love games like this. I used Vim Snake to make the muscle memory for hjkl finally stick in my brain. (I wish you could disable the insert mode toggling -- it's cute but didn't help when I was trying to break the habit of moving my finger up to press W or Up Arrow and remember that everything is in a straight line.) https://vimsnake.com

Thank you!!

I will add an issue for this!

Re: Show HN: Zsweep – Play Minesweeper using only Vim motions

#25

Post by oug-t » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

zahrevsky wrote: post #12

Too bad it doesn't display the keyboard on mobile :-(

Yes, I will try to implement the mobile support for zsweep.

I opened an issue on the repo regarding this, thanks for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: Zsweep – Play Minesweeper using only Vim motions

#26

Post by oug-t » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

TheGRS wrote: post #17

Very nice, only feedback I have rn is you should keep the board state displayed after you hit a mine. I like to look around the board to see what I missed after making a mistake.

Yes, after game loss, it should display all the mines and wrong flags marked.

I opened an issue regarding to this, Thank you for the advise!!

Re: Show HN: Zsweep – Play Minesweeper using only Vim motions

#27

Post by oug-t » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

Thanks all for the feedback and upvotes!

Motivated by the response, I just pushed a cleanup of the repo to make it easier to build and run locally.

I am now opening issues for the specific requests mentioned here--like adding the `e` motion, improving `w/b` logic, and preserving the board state when game over.

Thank you again, PRs are very welcome!!

Repo: https://github.com/oug-t/zsweep

Re: Show HN: Zsweep – Play Minesweeper using only Vim motions

#28

Post by schmooser » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

Reaching RET to open a block is too far from the home row, very unpleasant. C-m (Control-M) is much better and supported by both vim and Emacs.

Re: Show HN: Zsweep – Play Minesweeper using only Vim motions

#29

Post by shagie » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 11:34 PM UTC

A friend of mine back in college was a minesweeper addict - he'd play it all the time on the computer lab staff machine (where he worked) when it was quiet but the manager eventually took all the games off all the machines.

https://github.com/rwestlund/freesweep was the result.

As he was learning how to program at the time, he decided to undertake writing minesweeper that he could play from a telnet session from the library or one of the vt100 terminals in the lab. And yes, he also had difficulty with the chording logic. He called it "super click" (that code is in clear.c). Part of the initial challenge was since he was taking this as his first project and before really reading the K&R everything was a one dimensional array (>.Movement code is in play.c

Re: Show HN: Zsweep – Play Minesweeper using only Vim motions

#30

Post by oug-t » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 11:56 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #29

A friend of mine back in college was a minesweeper addict - he'd play it all the time on the computer lab staff machine (where he worked) when it was quiet but the manager eventually took all the games off all the machines. https://github.com/rwestlund/freesweep was the result. As he was learning how to program at the time, he decided to undertake writing minesweeper that he could play from a telnet session from the…

That is a interesting story!

I will definitely checkout play.c for reference.