Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

vimified.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 265 posts

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#51

Post by Silica6149 »

quest88 wrote: post #47

How does yours compare to shortcutfoo.com?

Thanks for asking, I actually have practiced vim on shortcutfoo.

It is really good for remembering shortcuts for regular desktop applications, but I felt that it wasn't really meant for learning a code editor like vim.

It did not have an interactive code editor, with the ability to edit lines of code inside of it. In addition, it does not measure progress in terms of speed and # of keystrokes, so you aren't able to see how you could improve. If I recall correctly, it is just meant for remembering the command keystrokes and typing them out (kind of like using flashcards).

Also, as of right now, shortcutfoo is $8 monthly, but it allows access to all shortcut courses.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I used shortcutfoo a few years ago.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#52

Post by konart »

dash2 wrote: post #15

I really want to like vim and I love some things about it, like the ability to move chunks about with only the keyboard. But so many things about it kill me. Like, why can't I hit right at the end of a line, and move to the next line? Who thinks that is a good idea? Also, why do I have to have a special mode to insert things? Having to change modes just seems so complex and unintuitive. And why does the help system n…

> there are fixes for all these things,

No, because those are features, not bugs. If don't want them - you don't have to even think about them.

>Like, why can't I hit right at the end of a line, and move to the next line? Who thinks that is a good idea?

It's not that you can't. The idea behind vim-like navigation is that you don't press those arrows (or hjkl for that matter) in a consecutive manner (or hold) unless you really have to. 99% of the time you jump to some place in the text (a character, or line, a word, a nth line etc).

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#53

Post by stcg »

mknsri wrote: post #43

I tried out vim for a month or so. I did enjoy using it, although I'm not sure if using vim just feels more productive because you press more keys to do the same thing. However multi-cursor editing and cutting whole lines in modern editors is way more conducive to my workflow and eventually stopped using vim. Do vim users know if there was anything like Select next occurrence in vim? Feature discovery is not one of v…

> Do vim users know if there was anything like Select next occurrence in vim?

You can press '*' in normal mode to search for the word under the cursor.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#54

Post by agumonkey »

dash2 wrote: post #15

I really want to like vim and I love some things about it, like the ability to move chunks about with only the keyboard. But so many things about it kill me. Like, why can't I hit right at the end of a line, and move to the next line? Who thinks that is a good idea? Also, why do I have to have a special mode to insert things? Having to change modes just seems so complex and unintuitive. And why does the help system n…

Have fun in other editors for a while (no need to suffer something that annoys you), and reconsider vim in a year. Its ergonomics can be frustrating at first but the design is sound enough to be valuable, fun even. And I say as an emacs user :)

You don't really move a caret around in vim, you process units of text and lines.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#55

Post by tylerhou »

mknsri wrote: post #43

I tried out vim for a month or so. I did enjoy using it, although I'm not sure if using vim just feels more productive because you press more keys to do the same thing. However multi-cursor editing and cutting whole lines in modern editors is way more conducive to my workflow and eventually stopped using vim. Do vim users know if there was anything like Select next occurrence in vim? Feature discovery is not one of v…

I use / to search by a string (or press * while my cursor is on a word to search for that word), then press n or p to go to the next or previous. cgn changes the matched text, and you use . to repeat the change, so to change a word over all occurrences I just cgn once and repeatedly press “.” .

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#57

Post by Silica6149 »

imperistan wrote: post #50

I write C# three days a week. Is learning vim worth it?

Nope. If you're already comfortable in your code editor of choice and like it, there's no good reason to switch.

However, if you've seen people use it in real life or in youtube videos, and think that it's cool being able to execute precise and fast commands without needing to move your hands from the keyboard, to edit code exactly how you want to, definitely try it!

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#58

Post by johncoltrane »

Silica6149 wrote: post #6
johncoltrane wrote: post #4

> Let me know what you guys think about it :) Same as the last time you posted it: learning Vim has nothing to do with muscle memory and doing it outside of Vim is pointless. Plus, the "master Vim" claim is dubious given how basic the lessons seem to be. :help user-manual is easy, built-in, and it goes way beyond this. And it's free.

Hi, I understand where you're coming from. My introduction to vim was through vimtutor and it was free! I agree with your point about muscle memory. Learning !== muscle memory. However it does make it more comfortable to edit code by not having to expend energy remembering the vim command to do something (since you can just focus on editing code). Practicing new vim commands in the interactive editor has helped me us…

> The interactive editor aims to bring the skills you develop while practicing in it, into your daily code editing, by making you practice on code snippets (for all the lessons after the first 2).

If only Vim itself was an interactive editor.

> In addition, in my opinion, vimtutor and :help are slightly difficult for a complete beginner to parse because they overwhelm with a little too much information.

Except I mentioned :help user-manual, which is built-in and offers a very gentle, progressive, learning curve. Not overwhelming at all.

Vimtutor only introduces the basics and :help, assuming you mean "the reference manual" as opposed to "the user manual", is not suitable for the first steps of learning at all: most of it is really just a reference for when you are not quite sure about the specifics of a command or function.

> I tried to fix this by making each lesson focused on a single topic, with short and simple explanations.

Not much more than the user manual, then, and judging by the lesson titles, quite less.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#59

Post by immigrantheart »

JulianWasTaken wrote: post #41
immigrantheart wrote: post #36

I'm a vim user. Over the time I dwindle down my plugins and stick to the basic ones because I often do SSH and don't want my environment to change rapidly. One thing that I still need though, is proper syntax highlighting. I wish there is an easy way for vim to do it rather than just too many plugins here and there.

Do what makes you happy, but just in case you weren't aware, vim supports editing over SSH natively, so there's not really a need to skimp just because you need to edit files remotely, you can use your local machine's setup to edit remote files. The SCP incantation is `vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt`, or see `:h netrw` or various tutorials you'll be able to find.

Ooh I didn’t know this. Thank you.

Re: Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster

#60

Post by lavela »

mknsri wrote: post #43

I tried out vim for a month or so. I did enjoy using it, although I'm not sure if using vim just feels more productive because you press more keys to do the same thing. However multi-cursor editing and cutting whole lines in modern editors is way more conducive to my workflow and eventually stopped using vim. Do vim users know if there was anything like Select next occurrence in vim? Feature discovery is not one of v…

This article might go a bit over your head if you just started using vim, but I found it to be very helpful for typical multiline/multifile editing tasks in vim: https://bluz71.github.io/2019/03/11/find-replace-helpers-for...
Post reply on HN