VIM Master

Pricing and Subscription Models

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the pricing of Vim Adventures, with many users expressing a preference for one-time purchases over subscriptions.

• "Personally, I would happily pay for vim-adventures, but never monthly. It provides one-time value, it should one-time cost. I'd much rather pay a one-time cost and get a downloadable local copy." - JoshTriplett
• "I found a pricing dialog after clicking “buy a license”, it said that six months of full access to the game costs $35." - reddare
• "Yep, I was trying to buy some licenses for my school, and they only offerend subscriptions in which I am not interested. A shame! Such a great game." - omidmash
• "I paid for it, was worth it for me. Reason: I did vimtutor 4 times and was learning but found it super painful/boring, but really wanted to learn vim keybindings. Vim adventures made learning keybindings and muscle memory just tolerable that I could do 1h in the evening even after a long/busy/tedious day." - nomilk
• "I paid once, but it's valid only for 6 months. I would reuse it once in a while for fun, but I won't pay again and again." - palata
• "The required login/sign-up, privacy policy and lack of apparent open-sourcing seems antithetical for the average Linux user. You're going after a niche of a niche of a niche with this one, good luck lol." - mac-attack

Learning Curve and Effectiveness

Users debated the effectiveness of Vim Adventures and other gamified learning tools for Vim, with some finding them helpful and others believing they don't go deep enough or even teach bad habits.

• "I think this one asks you to pay for it after a bit. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just felt bad about getting a little bit in, and then being hit with a decent pay wall." - ixwt
• "This was quite weird and honestly a bit infuriating. Just felt like it was encouraging really bad habits in vim. You start out and you only have h,j,k,l available to you (despite what the help says). So just end up holding the keys and maybe that's fine but then that first level is WAY too big." - godelski
• "I highly suggest vimtutor to people because what a lot of people miss while learning vim is that there isn't actually much to remember. There's sets of motion keys and sets of command keys. The beauty of vim is that the commands are putting these together." - godelski
• "I created a ViM Message of the Day script that I added to my shell to give me a prompt every time I opened a new shell (Which I do constantly in ViM and Tmux since I've created leader key shortcuts in both)... Anyways, it's great cause it gives you one tip or command at a time, and so you can sort of slowly grow without really having to dedicate much time to it." - codyb
• "I like how it starts with how to exit vim, but let's be honest: word jumps are not that common to teach second" - sheerun
• "I generally recommend to exit either via :xa (save all & exit) or :qa! (discard all and exit), bound to ZZ or ZA respectively. If you exit via :q or :wq, it just closes the current buffer, and moves to the next one. E.g. if you have a neotree open along with the editor, you type :wq, it closes the editor buffer and moves you into the file tree, which can be very confusing for beginners." - MrResearcher
• "Learned vim with a game like this. It was a vscode extension, I don’t remember what it was called. Anyway it’s easily the best time investment I’ve ever made, period. Takes a couple days of messing around, and you can basically never leave modal editing behind! It’s just so much better." - chamomeal
• "So yes, make it a game. But know that Vim is not beaten. It is befriended over years, not minutes." - jasoneckert

The Value of Vim Mastery and Advanced Features

Several users expressed a desire for learning tools that go beyond basic Vim commands, focusing on efficiency and more advanced concepts.

• "However, one thing I really struggle with is learning when I can be doing something more efficiently. I rarely use markers, anything beyond default registers, commands, and so on." - benjaminclauss
• "I’m giving Neovim a try for my systems course trying to get better but I do wish these sorts of games pushed me to get better at these more advanced usage tricks." - benjaminclauss
• "I feel like someone has probably made something this - something that progressively works through soem of the more complex features of vim." - absolute_unit22
• "I am intermediate in VIM and use it very frequently so the basic stuff I have down, but I am slow when doing things advanced. If anyone has a game like this but has advanced topics and is good for practicing those advanced topics I'd love to hear about it." - indoordin0saur
• "Nice job. Ideal next level should be macros." - linhns
• "joshcsimmons: cute but should go much harder/further" - joshcsimmons
• "That’s what I’m kind of looking for. Something that shows more advanced features. I feel like most of these tutorial like apps just scratch the surface and are more beginner focused." - absolute_unit22
• "What I don't understand is how anyone who actually learned the basic movements can go back to using arrows or mouse to move inside text. Like sure, use VScode but if you actually took the time and know how to move in vim when will vanilla editing beat vim plugins for popular editors?" - jack_pp
• "Throw macros and registers on top… delicious." - chamomeal

Alternative Learning Resources and Tools

The discussion highlighted various alternative resources for learning Vim, including vimtutor, other gaming-like tools, and specific plugin recommendations.

• "A free alternative for learning just hjkl, nethack supports this way of moving[1]. Remember to keep your index finger on ‘j’ (don’t shift your hand to ‘h’), to build the muscle memory." - merelysounds
• "I'm surprised they don't even mention vimtutor. It's preinstalled on every machine with vim (to the best of my knowledge). This seems like a cool project, but might as well give a shout-out to the original concept." - cramsession
• "vimtutor is to Babbel what this is to duolingo. Many will prefer learning through a game but some want a more textbook approach. Honestly, anything to get more people on vim and emacs is a good thing in my book!" - nunez
• "This one is also nice to get going: https://www.vim-hero.com/" - pixelentry
• "Working on my own similar project: https://vimgolf.ai To learn new vim motions. Have since gotten distracted by life, but need to actually finish it." - nickandbro
• "PacVim (https://github.com/jmoon018/PacVim) is in the official Debian repo as an option as well." - mac-attack
• "Back from when those screencasts were a thing, http://vimcasts.org/episodes/" - raldu
• "I got the muscle memory for hjkl down by playing https://vimsnake.com/" - johnhamlin
• "Vscode Vim Academy https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kaisun.v... Does that look like what you used?" - MikeTheGreat
• "There is always https://vim-adventures.com/" - TrainedMonkey

Vim Philosophy and User Experience

The discussion touched upon the philosophy behind Vim, the importance of muscle memory, and user experience quirks.

• "I found a pricing dialog after clicking “buy a license”, it said that six months of full access to the game costs $35." - reddare
• "The beauty of vim is that the commands are putting these [motion keys and command keys] together. For example, say you learn b,w,e and then you learn d. You now automatically know db, dw, de, dd. You didn't learn 4 new things, you learned 1 new thing." - godelski
• "Users often find themselves wanting to learn the less common keystrokes or advanced motions but struggle to find structured ways to practice them." - benjaminclauss
• "I don’t have much use for vim, and I have opinions on tools like this going beyond a certain level of efficiency because IMO the true bottleneck is usually decision/design based not implementation based, this just kinda looks fun and the appeal of vim as just a thing that feels cool to use when you have mastery of it sounds cool." - jama211
• "I really don't want to learn much more of vi than is documented in the POSIX standard: [...] all the vim embellishments would be a clutter of my neurons." - chasil
• "That vi was standardized was one of the many failures of POSIX as an idea. The very idea that we should freeze a text editor for all time is silliness in the extreme." - jnwatson
• "But Vim is not merely a tool... it's a discipline. A lifestyle. It is not learned in an afternoon, nor in a weekend sprint of neon-highlighted tutorials. No, Vim is best learned like one reads a long, weathered tome: slowly, reverently, one page at a time." - jasoneckert
• "I can do some things that people using vim for decades didn't know was possible. I'm still not a vim master. How does one ascend to the levels of TPope?" - godelski
• "I generally recommend to exit either via :xa (save all & exit) or :qa! (discard all and exit), bound to ZZ or ZA respectively. If you exit via :q or :wq, it just closes the current buffer, and moves to the next one. E.g. if you have a neotree open along with the editor, you type :wq, it closes the editor buffer and moves you into the file tree, which can be very confusing for beginners." - MrResearcher