The shadowy cursor has come at last! The prophecy will be fulfilled!
May 10, 2013 1:48 AM   Subscribe

Vim Adventures. Have you always wanted to learn vim but were too intimidated by its vimness? Then give vim adventures a shot! Combining fantasy adventure with learning an archaic terminal program, this game is so nerdy you'll surely alienate friends and family. But who cares, you'll know vim!

Remarkably, the game is actually fun. The first few levels are free and the rest come with a $10 fee.

NB: As a vim user I didn't play through the whole thing, but I bought it for my girlfriend and she thinks it's fantastic.
posted by Alex404 (42 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love it. Not a game to :q!
posted by tykky at 1:58 AM on May 10, 2013


Course, in a proper editor, the fantasy game could've been embedded. Naming no names.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:15 AM on May 10, 2013 [8 favorites]


It was fun to practice navigating with HJKL on Dvorak. The H and L keys are on the same fingers as in QWERTY, and the J and K are next to each other in a different location, so you can go right/left with your right hand and down/up with your left hand.
posted by Phssthpok at 2:26 AM on May 10, 2013


First off, HTML5 has come a long way.

Beat level 3, but the message I got was "Get your 6 months license for only $25" with a promise that "The license is valid for 6 months after the game development ends." So I'm not sure where that $10 fee you mentioned is coming from.
posted by dragoon at 2:39 AM on May 10, 2013


This is pretty neat. I accidentally started emacs in college because that's what the course instructions told me to start. I like it now but have always thought I should learn vi(m). Gaming it is a great idea.

First complaint, though: WhyTF are the movement keys hjkl instead of the right hand homerow keys of jkl;?
posted by DU at 4:17 AM on May 10, 2013


First complaint, though: WhyTF are the movement keys hjkl instead of the right hand homerow keys of jkl;?

Go to google and slowly type in "rsi right".
posted by 23 at 4:21 AM on May 10, 2013


Yeah, it's cute. But $25 for a 6-month license to play a VIM tutorial?
posted by das_2099 at 4:38 AM on May 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


The part that makes me uncomfortable about the commercial nature of this is that basically all his art is Creative Commons stuff. He does credit it properly, but it still seems strange to be charging so much and at that point not even selling the game outright.
posted by 23 at 4:45 AM on May 10, 2013


DU: "First complaint, though: WhyTF are the movement keys hjkl instead of the right hand homerow keys of jkl;?"

Blame the ADM-3A terminal
posted by namewithoutwords at 5:11 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


also: for those looking to learn vim, it almost always ships with the "vimtutor" command which is a walkthrough for the basics.
posted by namewithoutwords at 5:13 AM on May 10, 2013 [3 favorites]


Great game, but wow that paywall was a shock to the system.

I'm hoping someone will build "emacs Adventures". Plot: the lonely Gnu has to build towers of meta-key combinations to overcome obstacles.
posted by sixohsix at 5:20 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


An emacs game would require some extra fingers. Or some extra hands. Maybe two-player cooperative?
posted by Cash4Lead at 5:48 AM on May 10, 2013


I'm kind of torn. I'm a very naive vim user in that I very rarely do anything that really uses its power and, when I do, it's copying something off StackOverflow. My vim skills are so rudimentary that I played the first three levels and learned what 'x' does. But I'm not sure I'm going to remember it by the time I get to campus. Or even the commands for navigating by word, which I know, but can't remember when I want them, if that makes sense. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure the game is amusing enough for you to internalise these things before becoming outrageously bored.
posted by hoyland at 5:59 AM on May 10, 2013


We could implement a game like this in emacs to teach people the vi emulation modes (viper, evil etc).
posted by wobh at 6:02 AM on May 10, 2013


I'm hoping someone will build "emacs Adventures". Plot: the lonely Gnu has to build towers of meta-key combinations to overcome obstacles.

When you win you get a wrist brace for the carpal tunnel you've developed over the course of the game.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:12 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


In a thousand years, if we manage to get over our racism, nationalism and gender politics, there will still be one fight.

vi vs emacs
posted by jaded at 6:12 AM on May 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


M-x dunnet
posted by usonian at 6:21 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


In a thousand years, if we manage to get over our racism, nationalism and gender politics, there will still be one fight.

vi vs emacs
posted by jaded


I tried them both and they both suck, I just ftp it over to a windows box and use edit.
Whoa, how did a crowd with pitchforks and torches gather so fast?
posted by 445supermag at 6:46 AM on May 10, 2013


I'm a very naive vim user in that I very rarely do anything that really uses its power

The main thing to remember with vi is that it has two modes: one in which it beeps and one in which it doesn't.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:10 AM on May 10, 2013 [3 favorites]


The emacs game would have to cost $120 because it comes with an extra peripheral, a foot pedal.
posted by Joe Chip at 7:11 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


OMG this is brilliant.
posted by gsteff at 7:35 AM on May 10, 2013


MartinWisse: "Course, in a proper editor, the fantasy game could've been embedded. Naming no names."

Don't be shy, Microsoft Word is indeed a very powerful editor.
posted by vanar sena at 7:43 AM on May 10, 2013


For people new to vim (or who haven't already ossified into their One True .vimrc), I'd like to recommend two things:

1) Tim Pope's sensible.vim is a great place to start. Actually, all of his stuff is worth looking at. Even if you don't end up using it as is, reading the code to see how he does things was very instructive to me.

2) vundle is an easy way to manage plugins and customizations from various sources, including github repositories and the vim scripts site. I use a common vimrc on Linux, OS X and Windows and vundle helps make it relatively painless.
posted by vanar sena at 8:02 AM on May 10, 2013


Eh, sorry about the false advertising with the 10$. When I bought it a few weeks ago that's how much it was. 25$ is pretty shocking if that's what it is now. Worth it if you have the money lying around, but yah. Sorry about that.
posted by Alex404 at 8:10 AM on May 10, 2013


I'm hoping someone will build "emacs Adventures". Plot: the lonely Gnu has to build towers of meta-key combinations to overcome obstacles.

Little-known fact: emacs is its own adventure game, where you play a tech worker suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, trying to become productive in an overly complicated operating system with arcane keyboard commands that share more in common with Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes than any computer application.

Maybe someday they'll add a text editor.

vim 4 life :wq!
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:49 AM on May 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


:%s/\$25/free\!/g
posted by newdaddy at 9:29 AM on May 10, 2013 [3 favorites]


When I was taking my first Computer Science programming class, my classmates learned to use VI. But since I had some kind of quixotic attraction to LISP and the MIT AI lab, borne out of reading Steven Levy's Hackers, I taught myself EMACS instead. The latter's uncomfortable control-key combinations and ridiculous slowness on our overloaded timeshare system made me one unhappy guy for the entire semester. I switched to VI and have never regretted it -- it's light and fast and doesn't hurt my hand.

But the fact that people are still having this argument is a classic example of What's Wrong With The Unix World. These people are ridiculously conservative. Both of these editors are from the 1970s and nobody's come up with a replacement (so much better that it's confined VI and EMACS to the status of, e.g., ED or TECO). Instead, the attitude is that you should learn whatever your elders and betters did, and improve it from there. Why the heck are people still using TAR (the Tape Archiver) to bundle up files? -- always with the extra -f switch that tells it "don't actually try to write to a big spinning magnetic tape reel that hasn't existed for 30 years, just fake it and write to a file." In the PC world, the latest tools regularly replace the older ones (ARC became ARJ became LHA became LZX became PKZIP, etc.) and it's your responsibility as a PC owner to keep up.

vim 4 life :wq!

You mean ZZ
(no wait you "shouldn't" use ZZ because there was a bug in it in 1970s-era VI. seriously I had someone tell me this once.)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:44 AM on May 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


*cough* you mean :x!
posted by fragmede at 9:49 AM on May 10, 2013


Harvey Kilobit: "Why the heck are people still using TAR (the Tape Archiver) to bundle up files? -- always with the extra -f switch that tells it "don't actually try to write to a big spinning magnetic tape reel that hasn't existed for 30 years, just fake it and write to a file." In the PC world, the latest tools regularly replace the older ones (ARC became ARJ became LHA became LZX became PKZIP, etc.) and it's your responsibility as a PC owner to keep up."

Because none of the other common archive formats properly store UNIX permissions and metadata, or support de/serialization without a central directory structure (allowing streaming). Tar is more resilient than zip and 7z at least, not sure about others like .arc or .arj or .rar or whatever is the current fad on windows.
posted by vanar sena at 9:59 AM on May 10, 2013


If you are looking to get the muscle memory of actions down, ShortcutFoo is pretty cool. And it's not just vim, they have emacs, if you're into that sort of thing, as well as Photoshop, TextMate, Excel, Git, and a bunch more.

It has definitely made a huge difference in my vim productivity. They offer upgraded functionality as well for a one time fee which ranges from $5 to $15.
posted by addyct at 10:03 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


Because none of the other common archive formats properly store UNIX permissions and metadata, or support de/serialization without a central directory structure (allowing streaming). Tar is more resilient than zip and 7z at least, not sure about others like .arc or .arj or .rar or whatever is the current fad on windows.

So write a new one on Unix that does the right thing. Why wasn't this done as soon as TAR's defaults became archaic, which was in, like, 1981? Why is there this attitude of "make do with whatever came out of the '70s"? (Why do the Autotools use freakin' M4 instead of saying "install this better macro system"? Why does everyone still learn MAKE even though its author admitted -- a few weeks after he wrote it -- that he had screwed up the syntax?)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:12 AM on May 10, 2013


I guess I'm of the school that thinks breaking compatibility with everything for the sake of an f is not worth it. I mean it's hard enough to get all the various BSDs and SYSVs and GNUs to agree on anything, why rock the boat on one of the few things on which they do agree.

I partially agree about make. Unfortunately, the state of the industry is such that when people do set out to replace it, instead of fixing actual core problems (as one of my profs tried to do a long time ago), we ended up with Ant. And seriously, fuck ant.

There's no excuse at all for automake and autoconf. We are 100% in agreement there. Use cmake.
posted by vanar sena at 10:30 AM on May 10, 2013


vim adventures? is that what you kids are calling nethack these days?

For reals, the reason I picked up vim quickly was because of having previously played a lot of nethack on a laptop without a numeric keypad. So on the one hand, hjkl was already second nature to me, but moreover (and I think this is both really important and really easy to overlook) I had already learned to think of letters on the keyboard as not just letters but also as commands.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:05 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


We stick with unix stuff from the 70s because unix is a unique way of doing things that helps you think in useful patterns that are much harder to get at in other contexts. And, well, simply because it is deeply, deeply, deeply embedded in our culture. Perhaps the fact that unix has all of these weird accidental historical traces that you have to understand to understand it is actually a strength of the thing.

In his In the Beginning was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson describes unix as the Gilgamesh epic for nerd culture, which is a metaphor that's so dead-on that I wish I had thought of it myself.

Granted, I'm speaking as someone who fetishes old technology more than he likely should...
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:14 AM on May 10, 2013


The Gnu emacs version of this would be like playing nethack inside of dwarf fortress about 2 hours after ingesting an entire sheet of acid.

Suddenly you'd feel as though you'll be eaten by a gnu.
posted by loquacious at 12:04 PM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's easy to grump about tar or make or whatever, but the average unix/linux user normally works under a similar windowed environment to well, everybody else and doesn't have to bother with this.

But for the people who need it, it's still there.

And if you look at where people do serious computing, command line operating systems enhanced and improved since the seventies are still the norm, whether they're Unix or something more exotic.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:52 PM on May 10, 2013 [2 favorites]


That said, I did feel for the poor bastards of sysadmins involved in a migration from openVMS to AIX a few years back, where their VMS based workload scheduler had to be replaced by a simple AIX shellscript kludge and they all had to learn vi to maintain and update the schedule...

That was the first and only time I've used vi in anger.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:55 PM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


I was pretty frustrated with vim until I remapped the esc key to a jj. That pushed me over the edge into a semi-productive vim user.
posted by hot_monster at 10:12 PM on May 10, 2013


Just like in every adventure game I try to play, I end up madly stabbing at the key that I hope will let me ESC.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:16 PM on May 10, 2013


Don't use anything with "make" in its title, more like. SCons can be a bit slow when your dependency tree gets large but the savings on developer time and sanity are worth it.
posted by invitapriore at 12:11 AM on May 11, 2013


Why the heck are people still using TAR (the Tape Archiver) to bundle up files? -- always with the extra -f switch that tells it "don't actually try to write to a big spinning magnetic tape reel that hasn't existed for 30 years, just fake it and write to a file." In the PC world, the latest tools regularly replace the older ones (ARC became ARJ became LHA became LZX became PKZIP, etc.) and it's your responsibility as a PC owner to keep up.

You just answered your own question. *nix users like to be in charge of their computers, not the other way around.
posted by DU at 3:27 AM on May 11, 2013 [1 favorite]


We stick with unix stuff from the 70s because unix is a unique way of doing things that helps you think in useful patterns that are much harder to get at in other contexts.

Seriously. I routinely execute commands from the CL that most people write programs for. Granted, they are basically simple shell scripts but they are MUCH MUCH simpler shell scripts than they would be computer programs. For instance:


for item in $(pql -c "some query"); do echo launch-my-software $item; done | parallel


One simple line and I'm parallel computing against a huge database.
posted by DU at 3:33 AM on May 11, 2013 [1 favorite]


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