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 - 33970 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 / 7503
  • Number of attempts: 5
Swap values - 4703 entries

Well, swap the values...

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #765 / 1291
  • Number of attempts: 3
One number per line - 18889 entries

Just give me the numbers.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 17
  • Position: #1259 / 3898
  • Number of attempts: 8
Swap values inside brackets - 2546 entries

Easy challenge.

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #252 / 592
  • Number of attempts: 4
V to the i - 4860 entries

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

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 8
  • Position: #1379 / 1910
  • Number of attempts: 2
Applying same text modification in several lines - 2927 entries

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

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #382 / 865
  • Number of attempts: 2
remove lines containing the word "reader" - 3645 entries

easy stuff

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 10
  • Position: #616 / 1182
  • Number of attempts: 3
Com(m)a Trouble - 3988 entries

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

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 13
  • Position: #254 / 908
  • Number of attempts: 4
Box it - 7998 entries

Create a box around a line.

  • Best score: 21
  • Best player score: 24
  • Position: #855 / 1898
  • Number of attempts: 2
Two pairs of cluster of letters creates word - 769 entries

Clean and group.

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 19
  • Position: #100 / 181
  • Number of attempts: 1
Every other line - 2945 entries

AaAaAaA

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #38 / 710
  • Number of attempts: 8
Extract argument from function - 2399 entries

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

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #381 / 767
  • Number of attempts: 4
Search and Replace 0 - 5115 entries

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

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #578 / 1667
  • Number of attempts: 4
Preferably without multi-cursor plugin - 557 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: #53 / 133
  • Number of attempts: 3
That hyphen - 2624 entries

"vim vi improved"

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 10
  • Position: #262 / 708
  • Number of attempts: 7
comment and uncomment code inline - 1161 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: #208 / 330
  • Number of attempts: 6
Just the middle - 11590 entries

Delete the instructions at the top and bottom.

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 8
  • Position: #2840 / 4246
  • Number of attempts: 3
Team names - 1858 entries

The team names are misspelled.

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #226 / 594
  • Number of attempts: 4
Basic renumbering - 5731 entries

Renumbering Basic.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 13
  • Position: #317 / 1277
  • Number of attempts: 8
Adam's challenge - 1018 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 / 278
  • Number of attempts: 5
42-header - 55 entries

Rush 42mexican-standoff at 42 school

  • Best score: 22
  • Best player score: 23
  • Position: #8 / 18
  • Number of attempts: 8
ninja substitution - 1436 entries

How can you reuse a previous substitution ?

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #97 / 270
  • Number of attempts: 8
Vice versa - 8011 entries

Little role switching.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #462 / 2153
  • Number of attempts: 4
Lower cased and dashed strings - 51 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: #12 / 21
  • Number of attempts: 1
One to Ten - 2248 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: #479 / 686
  • Number of attempts: 6
Change part of a function name in multiple occurrences - 680 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: #105 / 212
  • Number of attempts: 3
Increment each number - 1063 entries

Increment each number individually by one

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #72 / 258
  • Number of attempts: 3
Delete to the end of the current line - 866 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 / 416
  • Number of attempts: 2
Separating firstname & lastname - 181 entries

Seperate named with equal tabs.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #13 / 61
  • Number of attempts: 6
move titles next to url, in quotes - 558 entries

had trouble with something similar

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #19 / 147
  • Number of attempts: 8
I forgot quotes - 16179 entries

Oops.

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #1865 / 4218
  • Number of attempts: 3
A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 ! - 10748 entries

A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 !

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #2396 / 3711
  • Number of attempts: 1
quotes inside quotes - 3200 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 / 1091
  • Number of attempts: 4
Words in parens - 13032 entries

We should all ace this, right?

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #1739 / 3986
  • Number of attempts: 2
Resort and deup a CSV list - 184 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: #23 / 45
  • Number of attempts: 9
switch variable - 5114 entries

how fast can you switch two variable ?

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Position: #549 / 1759
  • Number of attempts: 2
Sort and add attributes - 1572 entries

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

  • Best score: 33
  • Best player score: 33
  • Position: #217 / 610
  • Number of attempts: 2
Simple text editing with Vim - 13526 entries

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

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #1791 / 3879
  • Number of attempts: 2
Reformat/Refactor a Golfer Class - 7616 entries

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

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 35
  • Position: #409 / 1877
  • Number of attempts: 5
Arno
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entered into 39 challenges

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