DEV Community

Michael Bergen
Michael Bergen

Posted on

I built a terminal game that drills vim into your fingers. Looking for 10 testers.

#vim #beginners #showdev #productivity

I built Vim Dojo, a game that runs in your terminal and teaches vim by making you do the edits, over and over, until you stop thinking about them.

Nobody outside my house has tried it yet. Before I tell the wider world, I want ten people who are learning vim, or who tried and gave up, to play the first belt and tell me where it confused or annoyed them.

What it looks like

Every drill is a small, realistic editing task with a par: the number of keystrokes a fluent vim user would need.

  VIM DOJO ▸ Yellow Belt                       Lesson 2/10 · Drill 3/10
  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  TASK  Delete "quickly" — par 2

     ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   2 │ The fox jumped                               │
   1 │ over the lazy                                │
   3 │ dog quickly ran                              │
   1 │ home                                         │
     └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  -- NORMAL --  d·        strokes 3 · par 2        rep ●●○
  ✔ Clean rep! dw from the word start is the straight kill.
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  • Nine belts, White through Black. Each one adds a layer: survival, motions, inserts, operators, counts, text objects, search, the dot command, then vim golf.
  • Three clean reps to master a drill, each on different text, so you learn the move and not one answer.
  • Arrow keys are blocked. You get a coaching message instead.
  • Calm and untimed. Nothing counts down. Speed comes from fluency.

What it costs

The first three belts (White, Yellow and Orange) are free, with no account and no sign-up. The later belts need a one-time license. It is not open source.

Testers get the full license free.

What I'm asking

  1. Install it and play through White Belt. About 20 minutes.
  2. Fill in a short form: Google Form
  3. I email a free full license to the first ten people who do.

The feedback I need most is the unflattering kind: the install step that failed, the instruction you had to read twice, the moment you got bored, anything that behaves differently from real vim.

Install

On a Mac with Apple Silicon, paste this into a terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
curl -fL -o ~/.local/bin/vim-dojo \
  https://github.com/webtechmike/vim-dojo-releases/releases/latest/download/vim-dojo-darwin-arm64
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/vim-dojo
~/.local/bin/vim-dojo
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

It is a single file, signed and notarized by Apple, with nothing else to install. Intel Mac, Linux and Windows instructions are on the releases page, and there is more about the dojo at vim-dojo.com.

Your progress and scores stay on your machine. The free belts send nothing anywhere.

Thanks for reading, and for any time you give it.

Top comments (0)