I got comfortable on the basic Vim keys using shortcutFoo [0], plus actually diving in to using it full-time. Learning Vim takes full time usage as you need to switch over your muscle memory. I still find that GVim is brilliant for beginners as it is tolerant of using other style shortcuts so you don't burn yourself. Even though you might learn slower you're more likely to progress as it's less frustrating.
I don't know if there's much evidence of these game style methods actually working. I tried vim-adventures [1], but just found it annoying. As far as I can tell you just want to apply similar learning techniques as with touch typing, so just typing the letters to the screen.
As a side benefit of learning Vim, it's encouraged me to improve my touch typing because of the added benefit that you can type your Vim commands faster.
That's good to hear. As long as it's useful for some people that's all that matters for the people that created it. It's not like there's much evidence about the best way to learn Vim so your anecdote is as good as mine. At least there's a lot of people that have generated different methods to suit different people.
Vimtutor did not work for me, but vim adventures taught me enough to be comfortable using vim on a daily basis. I think it may be because vimtutor focuses on one topic at a time, while vim adventures forces you to use everything you learned up to a point, so it is more of a spaced repetition approach.
"This is a multi-player games that can be played over a network, or via multiple terminals on one machine. It consists of a top-down view of a maze where you run around trying to find your opponents to kill. There are a number of weapons and you can also play in teams. It is surprisingly fun, a sort of top-down text mode doom.
Originally written by Conrad Huang and Greg Couch in 1979/80."
Emacs has something called Keywiz https://marmalade-repo.org/packages/keywiz which will gather your keybindings (including custom ones) and ask them back to you as a quiz.
Not as cool as this but I used to play it back in the day and learnt quite a few neat tricks from it.
Absolutely. 19 years of using vi/vim, and kak won me over in less than a week. One year later, still very happy with kak. Vim is great, but kak is better. Its source code is pretty exemplary, too, and I don't ordinarily have anything at all good to say about C++.
A more ambitious project would teach a deep understanding of monads and/or the borrow checker through the mastery of pacman patterns. And if you're bad, you learn a lot about continuations.
Interesting that this was implemented as a standalone C++ Application. I was expected this to be a vim script like program, which would be more desirable as it would pick up on custom defined shortcuts in my ~/.vimrc.
Edit: arch has a package for it in the aur pacvim-git so pacaur/packer/yaourt can be used to easily install it
Edit2: the game doesn't really teach you anything this is basicly vim adventures without any explanation :/ would have liked something to give vim beginners to get comfortable with the keybinding while actually learning them
Those games are always for vim. But I would love to have something like this with emacs using all the transposition commands or what is available from paredit/smartparens.
I've never been either old enough (47) or cool enough (-20C) to really give a shit about vi/vim or emacs and co. I merely tolerate them and can do the very basics.
I use joe by preference at the console ("boredom" if you like - no real excitement) and live with nano. vi and emacs I merely tolerate because I generally have to look up something.
kate's alright - she's a pretty lass (for an editor) but needs a lot of Plasma and QT.
"JOE is a blending of MicroPro's venerable microcomputer word processor WordStar and Richard Stallman's famous LISP based text editor GNU-EMACS (but it does not use code from either program): most of the basic editing keys are the same as in WordStar as is the overall feel of the editor. JOE also has some of the key bindings and many of the powerful features of EMACS."
I still remember the vim movement commands from some game I played years ago when I tried to learn it. It's a nice way to learn. Reminds me of "typing games" that used to exist.
The classic key bindings for rougelikes were vi key bindings. So rogue, hack, nethack, moria... Newer games of the genera typically still allow the classic bindings, but not as easily supported.
Back in the early 90s, I learned the vi movement keys through hunt(6) from the BSD Games collection. Can't find a good link for the package, but here is the man page: https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/hunt/
I don't know if there's much evidence of these game style methods actually working. I tried vim-adventures [1], but just found it annoying. As far as I can tell you just want to apply similar learning techniques as with touch typing, so just typing the letters to the screen.
As a side benefit of learning Vim, it's encouraged me to improve my touch typing because of the added benefit that you can type your Vim commands faster.
[0]: https://www.shortcutfoo.com/app/dojos/vim
[1]: https://vim-adventures.com/