
OpenVim: Learn Vim in Your Browser - gbrindisi
http://www.openvim.com/
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s00pcan
vimtutor was all it took for me and didn't take that long. Yes, it takes about
30 minutes to get through, but I used it off and on as a refresher as I was
getting more accustomed to using vim. Here I am half a year later I do almost
all of my text editing using GVim. My advice would be to gradually ease into
the advanced commands and plugins and not to immediately try and fix every
problem you come across where vim doesn't behave like you would expect coming
from other editors.

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misterbwong
I found that vimemu's graphical tutorial cheatsheets were a great, incremental
way to get accustomed vim bindings. I can't speak to how accurate they are to
the "real" vi/vim, but they've helped me get used to Sublime's vintage mode.

There are 7 "lessons". I just printed them out and stuck a new one in front of
my keyboard every week or so.

[http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...](http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html)

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shurane
Okay, that is immensely helpful. It would be useful if there was an on-screen
keyboard that looked like that for OpenVim.

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nakkiel
How is this supposed to help anyone exactly? Many commands simply don't work
(^ or $ to name just two). People: skip this and use vim's :help.

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mushishi
Author here. Sorry about that. I didn't mean that this should get into the
wild this fast.

I fixed the link (I had renamed Bitbucket repository).

Also, it is not supposed to cover the whole of Vim. Just enough to get you
started without getting scared away immediately.

Also, thanks for the $ (it should work mostly but I haven't covered all the
different browsers; try alt-gr+4)

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zbuc
^ is also a handy shortcut, and usually more useful for programmers than 0. It
goes to the first non-whitespace character in a line.

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Ideka
I use _ for that. It's easier to type (at least in spanish keyboards).

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AlexC04
I love the concept but have two gripes.

1) the text "line in" for reading comes in too slow. I want the whole text up
on the screen in a flash so I can concentrate on reading. I usually either
find I'm faster than the "line in" animation _OR_ the line in is too
distracting to read around.

2) with respect to the tutorials, at the end of each section I should have all
the new commands "unlocked" so I can `h` `j` `k` `l` until I'm 100%
comfortable with what each key does.

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mushishi
Thanks for the feedback.

1) you can press any key to show rest of the text quickly. (not exactly on a
flash always)

2) I considered adding a sandbox view on the same page so that user could make
herself comfortable but decided against it, as I wanted to keep things simple.
So this kind of restricted command set in the actual tutorial might be a nice
solution; I haven't done it yet since it makes the flow non-linear; I might
make the tutorial more interactive in other aspects, but it needs still
thinking. Good point, anyway.

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mattmanser
Nice, despite all the nay saying, it's a good and low barrier intro to what
always had me wondering, what's so special about vim and the two modes?

Good job.

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docgnome
You mean, why is modal special? Vim has multiple modes to make it easier to
perform certain sets of operations. The commands for insertion of text are
separated from the command for manipulating the text. It's been years since
I've used vim but it certainly does make aspects of a keyboard driven editor
easier on the hands than emacs does.

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kqr2
For those who would like to try emacs in their browser, there is ymacs, a
emacs like editor implemented in javascript. It's not specifically a tutorial,
but it's good enough to try out the basics.

<http://www.ymacs.org/demo/>

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swah
IMO this is only justified if downloading the 40mb of emacs is taking a long
time :)

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jayunit
The "vim hero" idea you mentioned - similar to this? <http://vimgolf.com/>

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mushishi
Not exactly but it's one thing that was on the todo list; so now I don't need
to implement that :)

vimhero would be a single player game for practicing constantly progressing
challenges; of course, the idea might just not work.

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gbog
I am now near ten years of daily vim usage, maybe I am not like the others but
I still _do not use_ hjkl to move around. I do not think hjkl should be in a
first place of an introduction to Vim for coders. Instead, I would explain
about / ? * # > < and :s, which are the basic for editing code.

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mushishi
Thanks for the list of commands you find valuable. * and # are supported but
not in the tutorial yet.

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norswap
Not everything does work properly with non qwerty keyboards: for instance '0'
doesn't work in the sandbox for an be-latin keyboard (tough it works in the
tutorial), tough I suppose it doesn't work for every keyboard that need press
the maj key to produce a number.

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Bo102010
I had to turn of Firefox's Find As You Type to make it work, but well worth
it!

I have gone so far as to FTP files to myself to edit on a more familiar
editor, then FTP'd them back to the target machine rather than use vi, so it's
high time I internalized the basics.

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scrrr
I keep triggering vimium (Chrome) commands.. :)

But yeah this is nice. I consider myself proficient with vim and use it daily
for a year but I'd like to try such a tool for other editors. Say TextMate in
Ruby mode or emacs..

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bmccormack
It's not working for me on Chrome Stable 14.0.835.186 m. The report bug link
gives me a 404.

Looks like it works fine on Firefox 6.0.2, though.

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mushishi
I fixed the report bug link. Thanks!

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hunterclarke
I was just looking for something like this the other day. Good timing.

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juliano_q
Same here, I am finally forcing my head into vim. I always knew that it was a
good investment, but always stopped on the hjkl lesson.

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mushishi
This is heartening to hear. This kind of reception makes it all worthwhile.

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cake
I found it great, except part 2 of the tutorial is kinda missing.

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Greg12x
Wow. This is really helpful. I have always wanted to learn vim.

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kmm
Does anyone else have problems with Vim on AZERTY keyboards? It's really
annoying that I have to hold shift to enter numbers.

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guyht
This is a great start point for anyone wanting to learn vim!

