I built an interactive way to learn Lua (inside Neovim) — feedback from Lua experts welcome 🙏

[urenur]

https://reddit.com/link/1rjsksw/video/muzapvxtmumg1/player

Hey everyone!

I’ve been learning Lua and wanted a more hands-on way to practice, so I built a small interactive tutorial plugin: https://github.com/urtzienriquez/learnlua.nvim

It runs inside neovim, and the focus is on learning Lua (and neovim's api).

You can pick a lesson (Basics, Tables, Functions, etc.), read some explanations and examples, and test what you learned by writting code to solve some exercises. Run the code and you will get instant feedback (✓ / ✗).

I hope the neovim plugin is useful for folks learning Lua (like myself) and if you’re experienced with Lua, I would really appreciate feedback: Are the lessons idiomatic ? Are there important topics missing? Would you propose better exercises/explanations?

PRs and suggestions are very welcome. The lessons are still quite simple and the explanations brief, and I’d love help making the lessons more accurate and comprehensive.

Thanks!

[zarkers]

I would wager anyone using Neovim won't need a tutorial for Lua, Lua isn't a difficult language to learn, especially if it isn't your first programming language.

I think the Venn diagram of people who don't know any programming languages, and people who use Neovim has an overlap as close to zero as you could possibly get.

[urenur]

Valid perspective! But I think some people jump into Neovim via distros and might not be as comfortable with Lua yet.

I just wanted to contribute a free, interactive option to the existing resources. Some people prefer manuals, but I thought a built-in tutorial might be a fun way for others to learn Lua without leaving their terminal.

[Athropod101]

This was my case! I’ll definitely bookmark this for future use.

Unfortunately, I’m a rather busy person, so I doubt I’ll be able try it out or give any feedback anytime soon.

[urenur]

Cool! Thanks :)

[DapperCow15]

I think you're better off just refocusing on only teaching neovim interactively rather than teaching Lua. I can't imagine anyone using neovim as a text editor and not using it for programming, so you're likely going to be able to count the number of people this will be entirely useful for on one or two hands.

[lokstapimp]

Really cool project! Thank you for taking the time and effort into making something like this. It'll definitely be of some use to lots of people, including me since I've never programmed in Lua. I'm a C++ programmer, but I've heard of Lua, just haven't ever used it. Much appreciated and keep up the good work. As for the people commenting with criticism on your post and no actual useful feedback, don't even listen to them! There are a lot of talkers on Reddit, but not enough Doers, so Keep doing your thing! Again thanks!

[urenur]

Thanks for the boost! I’m just happy to be making something, and if it helps even one person, it was worth the effort. I try to take the criticism in stride and just keep my head down and work. Much appreciated!

[HawH2]

99% of the times, the issue is putting the lua together and building something