Real Vim ninjas count every keystroke - do you?

Pick a challenge, fire up Vim, and show us what you got.

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$ gem install vimgolf
$ vimgolf setup
$ vimgolf put [challenge ID]

Played Challenges

Simple, Practical, and Common - 33236 entries

Simple things we do all the time should be able to be done with very few keystrokes, but sometimes I find something I need to do makes me go, "There MUST be a better way." This challenge is just a simple movement and entering text at a certain place.

  • Best score: 22
  • Best player score: 22
  • Position: #1754 / 7330
  • Number of attempts: 5
Swap values - 4513 entries

Well, swap the values...

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #747 / 1250
  • Number of attempts: 3
One number per line - 18559 entries

Just give me the numbers.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 17
  • Position: #1241 / 3830
  • Number of attempts: 8
Swap values inside brackets - 2443 entries

Easy challenge.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #239 / 566
  • Number of attempts: 4
V to the i - 4717 entries

Input is 99 V's. Output is 100 i's.

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 8
  • Position: #1362 / 1874
  • Number of attempts: 2
Applying same text modification in several lines - 2820 entries

Remove identical text at the beginning of several lines and the closing parenthesis.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #367 / 834
  • Number of attempts: 2
remove lines containing the word "reader" - 3502 entries

easy stuff

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 10
  • Position: #594 / 1134
  • Number of attempts: 3
Com(m)a Trouble - 3552 entries

Someone was real stupid when placing his commas. Can you fix it?

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 13
  • Position: #229 / 798
  • Number of attempts: 4
Box it - 7782 entries

Create a box around a line.

  • Best score: 21
  • Best player score: 24
  • Position: #832 / 1853
  • Number of attempts: 2
Two pairs of cluster of letters creates word - 729 entries

Clean and group.

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 19
  • Position: #95 / 172
  • Number of attempts: 1
Every other line - 2869 entries

AaAaAaA

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #38 / 695
  • Number of attempts: 8
Extract argument from function - 2283 entries

The aim is to see if you can do some refactoring very fast.

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #367 / 739
  • Number of attempts: 4
Search and Replace 0 - 4766 entries

Replace every instance of 'aaa' with 'xaaax'.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #578 / 1578
  • Number of attempts: 4
Preferably without multi-cursor plugin - 530 entries

Originally asked as question on reddit by kpthunder: https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/9fvsro/what_is_the_most_efficient_way_to_go_about/

  • Best score: 30
  • Best player score: 33
  • Position: #50 / 125
  • Number of attempts: 3
That hyphen - 2530 entries

"vim vi improved"

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 10
  • Position: #255 / 690
  • Number of attempts: 7
comment and uncomment code inline - 1039 entries

It's very useful to be able to comment out a block of code in a quick edit. And likewise to uncomment the code. This operation often involves multi-line stanzas and even large blocks. With just line-wise navigation and insert mode this would cost you about 4 keystrokes per line. Master this hole of VimGolf and you'll quickly drop your key count in day to day Vim as well.

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 10
  • Position: #192 / 306
  • Number of attempts: 6
Just the middle - 11318 entries

Delete the instructions at the top and bottom.

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 8
  • Position: #2819 / 4152
  • Number of attempts: 3
Team names - 1795 entries

The team names are misspelled.

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #226 / 578
  • Number of attempts: 4
Basic renumbering - 5514 entries

Renumbering Basic.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 13
  • Position: #299 / 1249
  • Number of attempts: 8
Adam's challenge - 928 entries

Change both normal to bold and 4 by 2. Adam Wathan challenge this on twitter . He did it in 11 keystrokes on Sublime.

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 18
  • Position: #79 / 261
  • Number of attempts: 5
42-header - 36 entries

Rush 42mexican-standoff at 42 school

  • Best score: 22
  • Best player score: 23
  • Position: #6 / 13
  • Number of attempts: 8
ninja substitution - 1350 entries

How can you reuse a previous substitution ?

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #92 / 258
  • Number of attempts: 8
Vice versa - 7675 entries

Little role switching.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #462 / 2078
  • Number of attempts: 4
Lower cased and dashed strings - 46 entries

As I have to generate big fixtures files, I wanted to find a way to format input data the way described by start and end files. Especially the lower-cased-and-dashed ids Not so good to find a pure Vim way, that's why I submit this challenge ;)

  • Best score: 59
  • Best player score: 74
  • Position: #10 / 18
  • Number of attempts: 1
One to Ten - 2128 entries

Generate the sequence of numbers from 1 to 10, one number per line. Inspired by this Reddit thread: https://redd.it/ak4it2

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #454 / 652
  • Number of attempts: 6
Change part of a function name in multiple occurrences - 627 entries

Change the middle part of the function name in multiple places, preferably using the next and dot commands.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #98 / 200
  • Number of attempts: 3
Increment each number - 970 entries

Increment each number individually by one

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #69 / 240
  • Number of attempts: 3
Delete to the end of the current line - 729 entries

Delete to the end of the current line, but keep the character under the cursor.

  • Best score: 5
  • Best player score: 5
  • Position: #126 / 359
  • Number of attempts: 2
Separating firstname & lastname - 117 entries

Seperate named with equal tabs.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #8 / 54
  • Number of attempts: 6
move titles next to url, in quotes - 501 entries

had trouble with something similar

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #16 / 133
  • Number of attempts: 8
I forgot quotes - 15880 entries

Oops.

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #1839 / 4146
  • Number of attempts: 3
A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 ! - 10584 entries

A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 !

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #2364 / 3653
  • Number of attempts: 1
quotes inside quotes - 3105 entries

taken from tip 85 of the very good book 'Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought' ! I'd be interested what people use :)

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #313 / 1066
  • Number of attempts: 4
Words in parens - 12821 entries

We should all ace this, right?

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #1715 / 3938
  • Number of attempts: 2
Resort and deup a CSV list - 140 entries

I'm always adding items to a sorted list. There has to be a better way dedup and resort the lists. There are multiple lists with varying lengths to discourage manual sorting. Also Australia's animals are weird.

  • Best score: 44
  • Best player score: 48
  • Position: #18 / 38
  • Number of attempts: 9
switch variable - 5012 entries

how fast can you switch two variable ?

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Position: #549 / 1728
  • Number of attempts: 2
Sort and add attributes - 1273 entries

Sort the states and add the attribute country to each record.

  • Best score: 33
  • Best player score: 33
  • Position: #217 / 510
  • Number of attempts: 2
Simple text editing with Vim - 11962 entries

Make the pairs of lines match up by making each second line same as first

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #1710 / 3502
  • Number of attempts: 2
Reformat/Refactor a Golfer Class - 6336 entries

A simple case of removing unneeded code and fixing broken indentation.

  • Best score: 32
  • Best player score: 35
  • Position: #375 / 1561
  • Number of attempts: 5
Arno
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entered into 39 challenges

contributed 0 challenges