Tried the Excel ones - seems to work well enough. Except the shortcuts are not the ones I use daily...and Excel has a lot of shortcuts so matching the drills with users might be a hint tricky.
Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
#12I think what's more important is the meta-level skill of noticing when what you're doing should have a shortcut, and then finding or making a shortcut for it.
For textmate, I'd recommend learning just control-command T and the program-level shortcuts (closing many windows, opening the "go to file" dialog box, making a new file, etc).
Re: Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
#13Emacs, unsurprisingly, has a native key quiz program which is similar though more random. The package is called `keywiz`. I play it when waiting for stuff to compile and have picked up a trick or two.
Re: Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
#14Interesting, but for me useless. I use vim each and every day, and I think I have a good claim to some muscle memory. But this excercise asks you to press keys with no context. I can navigate with hjkl just fine, but actually struggled to remember which key to press. But in vim I'm fine. Separating the shortcuts from the editor is not a good thing.
I'm a proficient VIM user of approximately five years, and I was utterly useless on this training program.
I don't think that training on it would be useful at all.
Re: Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
#15Vim users may find this more useful: http://vimgolf.com/
Re: Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
#16While I'd definitely advocate getting extremely comfortable with your preferred text editor, this does not seem like a good approach at all. These drills ask you to do a specific command by description ("Move one character right"), which creates an association between that description and the editor action. However, when you're working quickly in an editor, you're thinking at a much higher level than "move one charac…
Immediately after trying it briefly I had the same thought. I wonder though if you could ever really describe what the "best" way to do something is in Vim. I believe we could be pretty clear that "xxxxx" is less efficient than "5x" or "daw", but in different contexts different ones would be appropriate.
If the goal is just muscle memory for beginners, I think instead you might want to have specific actions at a high level with the goal of using particular families of commands. For example, swap the highlighted two words in the following paragraph using only full-word commands. Then it could have a very clear and expected input for you to use as a goal and you could practice doing it.
Re: Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
#17While I'd definitely advocate getting extremely comfortable with your preferred text editor, this does not seem like a good approach at all. These drills ask you to do a specific command by description ("Move one character right"), which creates an association between that description and the editor action. However, when you're working quickly in an editor, you're thinking at a much higher level than "move one charac…
Immediately after trying it briefly I had the same thought. I wonder though if you could ever really describe what the "best" way to do something is in Vim. I believe we could be pretty clear that "xxxxx" is less efficient than "5x" or "daw", but in different contexts different ones would be appropriate. If the goal is just muscle memory for beginners, I think instead you might want to have specific actions at a high…
You can't uniquely identify one method as "best". In particular, there's a limit to how much you want to learn and use specialized commands versus a core set of broadly applicable commands. However, you can identify a set of broadly applicable commands that proficient users should know, and make sure they're at least using those, if not something even more specialized.
For instance, suppose you're sitting in the middle of a line, and you want to add a word five words to the right on the next line down. j5wi or /sometext[enter]i are both sensible ways to navigate. )wi might make sense if the insertion point is just after the end of a sentence. jwwwwwi is not horrific (given that visual counting may not be as fast) but probably deserves a warning as a reminder. jllllllllllllllllllllllllli is well worth warning about.
Re: Build Muscle Memory With Your Favorite Editor
#18While I'd definitely advocate getting extremely comfortable with your preferred text editor, this does not seem like a good approach at all. These drills ask you to do a specific command by description ("Move one character right"), which creates an association between that description and the editor action. However, when you're working quickly in an editor, you're thinking at a much higher level than "move one charac…
Immediately after trying it briefly I had the same thought. I wonder though if you could ever really describe what the "best" way to do something is in Vim. I believe we could be pretty clear that "xxxxx" is less efficient than "5x" or "daw", but in different contexts different ones would be appropriate. If the goal is just muscle memory for beginners, I think instead you might want to have specific actions at a high…
What about showing the cursor in the middle of some placeholder text, and highlighting the desired final cursor position with a red dot? This would offer a very specific goal to the user without the need for more complex, high level actions.