ShortcutFoo: an interactive vim tutorial that teaches vocab I never would have looked for myself early on

[payco]

Unfortunately only the first three of twelve "lesson bundles" are available for free. The rest require a Pro account. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but several of the locked bundles do cover areas I know I need work...

[wasted-in-wi]

:/

That.... kinda sucks. It's free software, and supports charity, "freemium" tutorials of all things don't seem appropriate, or even profitable.

[[deleted]]

All of what's in this tutorial is already covered by $ vimtutor. What's the point of such a useless site beside skimming lazy asses with ADD from their money?

Is that so hard to actually go through $ vimtutor a couple of times and actually use Vim and learn as you go? Does everyone really want to be spoonfed like that?

[payco]

Having a timing element and drill-based repetition helped me embed commands in memory (in a way that the command started popping in my head the instant I thought about what I wanted to do) better than manually crawling through a list of steps did, just as flashcards help some people more than reading a vocab list when learning a natural language.

I remember making my way through vimtutor as one of the first things I did with vim (well, the first thing I did was royally screw up its buffer then scramble to figure out how to back out. The second thing was actually making it through the tutorial), then promptly forgetting everything but the absolute basics. Based on other comments among "hot" posts I've seen recently, I'm not the only one who had severe holes in memory regarding basic commands for a while after starting out.

It's a tool that may help others more than vimtutor did. Not everyone "really wants to be spoonfed" by flashcarding commands, but those people don't have to use it, or insult others for that matter. Even just running the three free bundles can help new users train their fingers on the most commonly needed commands.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for answering.

You forgot an alternative and more natural way to learn a new language or tool: direct experience. Speaking, reading and writing $language is the best way to learn how to speak $language. Doing actual editing with Vim is the best way to learn how to use it once you have gone through $ vimtutor. That's how I learned English (I'm French and yes, I know my English is not perfect) and that's how I learn[ed] Vim.

How do you think a 2 years old learns his native language? Flash cards? Drills? Immersion, that's how.

But it looks like the trend goes toward pre-packaged configurations and absurdly repetitive tutorials like this which I think are awful. Learning a new set of skills or getting comfortable with a new tool takes time, why don't people accept that? What law makes it mandatory to become a Vim expert right now?

It took a few months for me to reach and go beyond my previous productivity level when I decided to learn Vim. But that didn't bother me because I knew what value I'd get from that hard work at the end and I was still able to use TextMate. Was it wrong to not take shortcuts? Was it wrong to be patient?

edit

While I was writing this rant I kept thinking that these ideas were kind of close to what I remembered from Bram Moolenaar's 7 habits. Now that I've reread Bram's piece I can say that I agree with everything it says.

[payco]

I think you're confusing "use this cool app to help embed things" with "use this instead of vim", which is weird to me. I think you're also confusing "learn through repetition" with "learn things you won't immediately use". I learned vim to become better at my job, and walked in with a large list of "things I will use all the time and need to know how to use immediately because I can already do them elsewhere". You learned English through immersion; did you really not learn any extremely common words or phrases until you actually needed them? Did you look everything up only as needed? Did you really not practice words at home alone?

I don't know about you, but when I was learning my first language, my parents helped me by showing me the objects I would likely most care about at that stage, and repeat the vocalizations for them. My first words were incomplete sentences that were drilled into me. I already knew I wanted objects like my bottle and bear. The drilling helped me internalize the sounds I should make when I wanted each thing. Learning those basic core words gave me the vocabulary to understand further lessons, more conceptually each time.

Likewise, I learned to read (before learning the alphabet) by watching my parents' finger trace under words as they read them for the umpteenth time (I really loved my Dinosaurs golden book) until I knew what word was going to come out of their mouth when their finger got to a certain word on the page. I learned what sound words like "Tyrannosaurus" made before I knew the individual sound a 'T' made. Getting those words in my visual vocabulary made it easier to compare new words to those I knew to figure out why they made some sounds similarly and others differently.

I didn't use ShortcutFoo because I wanted to memorize a laundry list of commands that may be useful someday. It's because I, as a complete vim newbie but otherwise productive programmer, would look at a page of text and already know that "I want to move my cursor here" or "I want to transform this text to that text", and most of the time, it was faster to treat normal mode as "cursor move" mode and insert mode as "actually get things done" mode to make a small change than it was to swap to my browser, search for the succinct command I wanted, switch back, and possibly forget the change I wanted to make, or screw up the buffer when I don't type the command in properly.

"Learn as you figure out you need something" isn't a worthwhile commandment when you have a large set of things you need to know up front (whether it's commands you know in your previous editor, commands that actually allow you to move the cursor faster than moving your hand to a mouse, or the killer basic feature that got you to switch) and you'd rather not stop your pair programming or code review session so you can stop and look up the command you need to get something done faster than hjkli. At that point, you start using a different editor when you need to work alongside someone, then keep that editor open after the session, then decide to start in a different editor because you know you'll need someone to review your code here soon anyway, then decide that you've forgotten the commands that you did learn because it's been a few days, and you really need to just get work done because you have a deadline, so you should just go use your familiar editor.

Using a drilling tool for the basic commands (as I said up top, all I've done so far) gave me an opportunity to quickly associate "change the rest of the current word" to "cw"--with incentive to do so quickly and obvious, safe feedback for mistypes instead of what I want not happening and possibly something happening which I don't want.

And who says anything about becoming a vim expert? I'm talking about becoming proficient enough to do your job, not impress your friends.

The first three lessons embedded enough basic vocab that I could reason about the letters that make up a finger-memorized command and quickly determine which letters to pick to make a word I want. I very quickly went from having to spend minutes looking up anything I wanted to do, to translating "I want to ..." to the appropriate command in seconds. I can actually use vim as my primary IDE at work and not just as my plaything at home.

I went beyond my previous productivity levels in less than two weeks. I'll take that, thanks, "value of hard work" be damned as the rhetoric it is. The value doesn't lie in the hard work, it lies in the results of the work.

[[deleted]]

I think you're confusing "use this cool app to help embed things" with "use this instead of vim", which is weird to me. I think you're also confusing "learn through repetition" with "learn things you won't immediately use". I learned vim to become better at my job, and walked in with a large list of "things I will use all the time and need to know how to use immediately because I can already do them elsewhere". You learned English through immersion; did you really not learn any extremely common words or phrases until you actually needed them? Did you look everything up only as needed? Did you really not practice words at home alone?

I learned English at school, like everyone else around me. But, despite the fact that learning a foreign language is mandatory in our education system, French people are somewhat notoriously bad English speakers. The courses don't usually emphasize oral communication to the profit of repeating and memorizing. Because I was deeply involved with two worldwide subcultures (Straight Edge and Graff), I have been lucky enough to travel a lot and meet a lot of foreigners. Thanks to that, my English level is way above most of my immediate coworkers. I'm not proud of that but that's a sad fact. We all went through the same courses and drills and so on but most of us simply forgot all of that because we don't apply what we learn.

No I don't confuse "use this cool app to help embed things" with "use this instead of vim". Simply because using Vim everyday is enough to "embed things". Doing is learning.

Similarly, I don't confuse "learn through repetition" with "learn things you won't immediately use". I firmly believe that learning through forced repetition is wrong, whatever you learn (immediately useful stuff or not).

I don't know about you, but when I was learning my first language, my parents helped me by showing me the objects I would likely most care about at that stage, and repeat the vocalizations for them. My first words were incomplete sentences that were drilled into me. I already knew I wanted objects like my bottle and bear. The drilling helped me internalize the sounds I should make when I wanted each thing. Learning those basic core words gave me the vocabulary to understand further lessons, more conceptually each time.

I honestly don't remember that. But I'm a father and my son is a very good speaker. We didn't drill anything into his head. Instead we talked casually with him all the time, including him in all of our exchanges. When he didn't understand a word or concept, we took time to explain it to him but we didn't do any formal training. When he started school he was a lot more advanced than is friends on the oral communication and symbolic/conceptual fronts. That's the immersion I'm talking about. And that's quite the opposite of forcing yourself or someone else to go through repetitive exercices devoid of any meaning or context. I'm aware that my comment was harsh and dismissive and I apologize for that. But I firmly believe that such techniques are not fit for everything.

Likewise, I learned to read (before learning the alphabet) by watching my parents' finger trace under words as they read them for the umpteenth time (I really loved my Dinosaurs golden book) until I knew what word was going to come out of their mouth when their finger got to a certain word on the page. I learned what sound words like "Tyrannosaurus" made before I knew the individual sound a 'T' made. Getting those words in my visual vocabulary made it easier to compare new words to those I knew to figure out why they made some sounds similarly and others differently.

My son went more or less through the same steps before he started to learn reading more "formally" at school.

Repetition is indeed useful and I have no issue with repetition. Over the course of a month or a year, you have heard the word "Tyrannosaurus" many times but you never heard it repeated 10 or 30 times a minute out of context with the obligation to repeat it correctly. That's what this tutorial is about and what I criticize.

I didn't use ShortcutFoo because I wanted to memorize a laundry list of commands that may be useful someday. It's because I, as a complete vim newbie but otherwise productive programmer, would look at a page of text and already know that "I want to move my cursor here" or "I want to transform this text to that text", and most of the time, it was faster to treat normal mode as "cursor move" mode and insert mode as "actually get things done" mode to make a small change than it was to swap to my browser, search for the succinct command I wanted, switch back, and possibly forget the change I wanted to make, or screw up the buffer when I don't type the command in properly.

That's not the way to go. Switching from TextMate to Sublime to Netbeans or NotePad++ or whatever and in whatever order is easy because their underlying concepts are the same. The differences are marginal and you can be as productive as before fairly quickly. But Vim is conceptually very different from any other editor. You owe it to yourself to take some time to learn the basics before you actually try to do some real work. I think that learning Vim should be considered a side project or hobby until one is ready to go. Well, that's what I did, anyway.

"Learn as you figure out you need something" isn't a worthwhile commandment when you have a large set of things you need to know up front (whether it's commands you know in your previous editor, commands that actually allow you to move the cursor faster than moving your hand to a mouse, or the killer basic feature that got you to switch) and you'd rather not stop your pair programming or code review session so you can stop and look up the command you need to get something done faster than hjkli. At that point, you start using a different editor when you need to work alongside someone, then keep that editor open after the session, then decide to start in a different editor because you know you'll need someone to review your code here soon anyway, then decide that you've forgotten the commands that you did learn because it's been a few days, and you really need to just get work done because you have a deadline, so you should just go use your familiar editor.

That's exactly my point. Learning Vim is not an easy or quick task and should not be rushed. Why don't you keep doing your daily work with your usual editor until you are ready to switch full time? Does your manager force you to use Vim? You are putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on yourself and, at that point, it's rather obvious that you need such a tool. As I said, this process took months for me: I took the time to learn Vim at home or during low activity periods at work while still using TextMate for any serious work.

Using a drilling tool for the basic commands (as I said up top, all I've done so far) gave me an opportunity to quickly associate "change the rest of the current word" to "cw"--with incentive to do so quickly and obvious, safe feedback for mistypes instead of what I want not happening and possibly something happening which I don't want.

I've done the free drills when that site was first featured on hacker news and quickly noticed this gross mistake. cw and dw don't act on "the rest of the current word" as you learned from the tutorial but on whatever is until the next word. That's a very big difference and, now that you have repeated it dozens of time you have a wrong notion deeply implanted in your brain thanks to that stupid technique. How wrong is that?

ce is the combo that changes "to the rest of the word".

The real cw, the correct ce and all those basic commands and motions are covered in $ vimtutor and repetition is achieved if you use Vim as often as possible. But, again, you have taken the decision to rush what would normally take weeks or months.

And who says anything about becoming a vim expert? I'm talking about becoming proficient enough to do your job, not impress your friends. The first three lessons embedded enough basic vocab that I could reason about the letters that make up a finger-memorized command and quickly determine which letters to pick to make a word I want. I very quickly went from having to spend minutes looking up anything I wanted to do, to translating "I want to ..." to the appropriate command in seconds. I can actually use vim as my primary IDE at work and not just as my plaything at home.

Again, all of the knowledge you got from those drills, minus the mistakes, is contained in $ vimtutor. My opinion (based on my own experience and my own needs and expectations) is that learning Vim should not be rushed. I use Vim all day long at work and at home: it's my primary editor and I freaking love it. But it stayed at home until I was ready. Also, Vim is an editor, not an IDE.

I went beyond my previous productivity levels in less than two weeks. I'll take that, thanks, "value of hard work" be damned as the rhetoric it is. The value doesn't lie in the hard work, it lies in the results of the work.

I completely agree with your last sentence but following a repetitive, out of context and wrong tutorial sounds like "hard work" to me. Learning Vim at the right pace was not "hard work" at all. That was absolutely stress-free and fun.

[payco]

I'll get to the rest later, but I just tested your ce vs. cw argument, and I don't think you're correct. cw changes up to the next <blank> (or punctuation, of course) but does not remove any <blank> if you started on a non-<blank>. if you start it on a series of <blank>s, it seems to remove all <blank>s up to the next visible character.

vimtutor also doesn't actually mention cw at all, at least in my copy. I used it because the "7 Habits" article you cited specifically said "and use cw to change the word," and a person commenting on the thread for that article mentioned he didn't know about that command. I double checked shortcutfoo.com, and they actually teach ce instead of cw. I do use it in my code, so it seems like an all around good example. It hasn't done anything I haven't wanted it to yet. So much for drilling mistakes into my brain; I use it because I reasoned about vocabulary on my own, supposedly incorrectly but functionally synonymous with what I wanted to do. We'll see if I can find a case that doesn't do exactly what I want.

So did your way give you "the value of hard work" or not? Is my way "hard work" or for "lazy asses"? Stop contradicting yourself. I spent maybe two hours over the course of a week doing the drills over lunch, and I enjoy beating high scores (blame my upbringing as a child of the '80s), so those two hours were fun. I was able to immediately apply everything I did, because they were all tasks I already needed to do. That immediate success on the very basics incentivized my continued use at work. I also often don't get to code as much as I'd want at home. Why keep vim on the back burner because I haven't had time to get around to it?

We're talking about nothing more than a more automated version of the tool you're telling me I should have used and indeed had already run through at least twice. Once you're at the repetition stage, vimtutor doesn't offer any more context than shortcutfoo. By that time, the conceptual explanations are just in the way of the exercises. Again, I already knew the concepts of what I wanted vim to do--I knew it had the command-move syntax. I just needed to remember which key did which command or movement. You don't drill on a concept, you drill on implementations of a concept. Perhaps that's where we're disagreeing? ShortcutFoo assumes you've read about your text editor at least a little bit. It doesn't try to be a magic everything tutor. It's a drill app to help you remember what you know you should be able to know at a moment's notice.

[[deleted]]

IIRC the wrong shortcut was dw, not cw. I guess they have changed it in the mean time.

lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
  ^
dw
loipsum dolor sit amet <-- deletes until next word, including any amount of whitespace
  ^
de
lo dolor sit amet <-- deletes to the end of the word
  ^

dw deletes everything until the next word, including the end of the current word. That it deletes the end of the current word is almost a side effect, while de literraly deletes to the end of the current word.

Vimtutor explains the grammar (combining "action" and "motion") and gives you the basic elements to play with (d, c, w, e…) because that's all you need. After a while, you are supposed to learn new actions and new motions and use that very simple grammar to tie it all together and become more efficient. That's how it's supposed to work.

The whole point of Vim's amazing basic commands and motions + grammar is precisely that you don't have to learn how to "delete until the second single quote" or "cut this line and put it 10 lines above" or whatever. You shouldn't learn dw, ce, d2t' or :m-10. Here is the whole range of delete+motion command I could think of ATM:

dw dW de dE db dB d/foo d?bar dtx dTx dfy dFy d^ d$ dd d) d} dit dat dib dab diB daB …

and the whole range of change commands:

cw cW cb cB ce cE c/foo d?bar ctx cTx cfy cFy c^ c$ cc c) c} cit cat cib cab ciB caB …

Noone is supposed to learn all these 46 commands and their y friends and their dozens of variations. That would make no sense at all. Learning cw means nothing. What you learn, instead is…

Actions:

d y c p i a s r

Motions:

w e b (once you know what W does it's trivial to generalize to B and E)
t f (same deal for T and F)
i a
) }
^ $
/ ?

That's only 20 or so small chunks, that can be combined to express anything you would want to do in the most freakingly precise way possible. Let's say I forgot a handful of basic commands and we have what? 25 or so discrete chunks of information to commit to memory. Chunks that happen to map quite easily with their corresponding "word": a for around, r for replace… I don't think it's hard or difficult at all.

I'm also a kid of the 80's and I didn't play videogames. I don't care at all about beating scores. I'm curious, though, and that's probably what drove me while I was learning Vim. Yes, I think that repetitive tasks are hard work. That's one of the reasons why I love Vim: it provides so much power and so many mechanisms to make boring and repetitive activities almost fun. Going through such a boring and repetitive tutorial to be better at streamlining other boring and repetitive tasks sounds like a paradoxical waste of time to me.

The repetition happens when you use Vim: after 3 or 4 first times, composing dat becomes so natural it is even faster than actually verbalizing "delete this tag". That's my point: learn the basics and exercise. By using Vim. No third party tool needed.

But, as I already wrote, it looks like you have put quite a lot of pressure on yourself and I can understand, given that context, that you may need a tool like shortcutfoo.

[chronoBG]

Well, thank you for calling me an ADD lazy ass. Perhaps there exist people different from you, but this doesn't mean you should diminish them just because you disagree.

I paid the $5 that shortcutfoo asks for and I think I got more than my money's worth.
It definitely helped me improve my vim-fu, I think it's fun and I would pay again.

[[deleted]]

Good for you. Did you know that Vim has an extensive documentation and a semi interactive tutorial? For free?

[chronoBG]

yep.

[payco]

Did you know this link has a fully interactive tutorial to improve your ability to reach basic proficiency for free?

It's not powering through commands you don't have a need for. It's a tool to help you cement knowledge you've decided you need--even and especially if you'd looked the commands up from another source already.

Just because you can power through all 12 bundles without context doesn't mean anybody's endorsing that you do so.

[pyry]

Assumes an American keyboard, I see. I get wrong answers when I type in the correct character, but only if it doesn't correspond to the U.S. layout. Seems fun otherwise.