Build muscle memory with your favorite editor

> Now, take @gruseom's idea of a visual "goal" that you are chasing, and I think this could be intensely valuable.

Yes, they really need to take the words out of the equation. It's just a superfluous modality that gets in between the muscle memory, the goals and the training.

Of course, this method will get you familiar with shortcuts rather quickly (I only tried the Vim ones), but then, so does printing out a cheat sheet, or reading some tutorial and an afternoon of practice. While I do believe ShortcutFoo does manage to teach that more effectively than those methods, that's not where it could really shine.

To become a pro text-editor user, you really need to go beyond that, hence muscle memory, not just "memory". You don't merely need to remember the shortcut for "go one word back" when presented with the written goal "go one word back", no you must intuitively know the shortcut as soon as you identify the goal already on an abstract level.

Even with a simple default editing control like this text box: As I'm typing these words, I'm not thinking of every letter I type, I don't think about whether I need to "move cursor left five times" or "move cursor left one word" or "delete word to the left" etc, I'm thinking about the sentences and ideas I want to put into this post and operate the keyboard to make that happen--and any literal textual description of shortcuts and movement commands would really just get in the way with my thought process.

I haven't seen @gruseom's post yet, so maybe s/he had the same idea but: Something like a phantom cursor that indicates "get the cursor to here" or half-fade a word that you must delete? But that may become too low level once you get more advanced. What you really need is a sort of visual indication that shows a diff between the original text and the goal text, you get to look at it to take it in while a quick countdown timer goes 3-2-1 and from that point it times how quickly you can edit to the target and how many keystrokes it takes you to do it. (could even make it a colour-coded actual diff, then people get to train reading diffs as well :) [something I need to practice myself])

I thought this was a great idea. But I simply am an idiot and can't figure out how to use it. They tell you to type these || characters and it always spits back a fail when I try it. They need more user testing feedback.

That's actually a very good description of my experience learning vim so far.

It starts off being a very conscious set of actions when first learning a new command -- e.g., "I want to change the word under the cursor... cw" -- before becoming something that happens subconsciously as I become more familiar with a set of commands.

Where this site at least appears to work well is that once I started to understand vim commands as verbs and nouns, I started seeing actions as sentences. The drills here seem to reinforce that sentence structure type approach.

I can see it being less useful for somebody that is familiar enough with their editor thatt it's already become a mostly subconscious process. While I'm comfortable using vim for the most part, I'm very far from a high level of proficiency with it.

Further,

I don't want to need muscle memory for editing!

I would take the hard stand that any repetitive keystroke combinations inherently implies inefficiency - ie, an ideal editor should provide enough shortcuts to give your keystroke stream a fairly high entropy content. Maybe we're not there yet but I don't want to develop habits which would stand in the way of such an ideal.

I'm hoping to get there soon. On linux, I use vim, a keyboard centric window manager and I've recently started using uzbl for my web browsing. Not there yet, but getting there - already I find I don't need to reach for the mouse very often at all!