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 - 33385 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: #704 / 7364
  • Number of attempts: 5
One number per line - 18616 entries

Just give me the numbers.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #236 / 3842
  • Number of attempts: 8
vim = 22 / 7 - 447 entries

pi square vim

  • Best score: 20
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #15 / 131
  • Number of attempts: 6
Search and Replace 0 - 4792 entries

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

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 13
  • Position: #753 / 1585
  • Number of attempts: 2
Python Hello World! Reformatting - 938 entries

A novice Python using prints Hello World! and a pro shows him different way. Using vim to get into pro style from novice, win the challenge.

  • Best score: 39
  • Best player score: 41
  • Position: #53 / 364
  • Number of attempts: 4
Swap assigned value - 626 entries

Simple problem but looking for interesting solutions.

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 10
  • Position: #48 / 250
  • Number of attempts: 3
Change your calendar - 362 entries

Happy New Year!

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 19
  • Position: #17 / 85
  • Number of attempts: 5
VimGolfNight - 536 entries

Based on "The name of the game".

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #26 / 343
  • Number of attempts: 1
quotes inside quotes - 3125 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: 16
  • Position: #529 / 1072
  • Number of attempts: 3
Top X - 191 entries

The End File is the Top 10 Vimgolf Leaderboard at June 29, 2013. This is a second version, with a great contribution of @udioica. X is ten in Roman,a numeric system in ancient Rome

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 25
  • Position: #26 / 69
  • Number of attempts: 1
Sort the VimGolf challenges by popularity - 345 entries

"Sort by popularity" is a good order to play the challenges. Not perfect, but you could do a lot worse. ;) Input is a sample copy-pasted from vimgolf.com. Some of the challenge names have digits that will get in your way, so read ":help :sort" for hints on sorting with a regex. When you're done, try your solution on the full list!

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #12 / 105
  • Number of attempts: 5
Number an outline - 249 entries

The indent and words are right, but the numbers are all wrong.

  • Best score: 25
  • Best player score: 30
  • Position: #10 / 75
  • Number of attempts: 3
Words in parens - 12858 entries

We should all ace this, right?

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #1204 / 3946
  • Number of attempts: 2
Pairs of numbers - 360 entries

Line 1 represents x, line 2 y-data. Bring the corresponding pairs in the form "[x,y]\n"

  • Best score: 26
  • Best player score: 27
  • Position: #8 / 133
  • Number of attempts: 3
Assign list - 169 entries

Assign list elements to matrix

  • Best score: 30
  • Best player score: 30
  • Position: #1 / 59
  • Number of attempts: 4
Draw the Go board - 140 entries

which is a 19×19 lines board. Here we use ascii characters only for simplicity. See diff file to get a sense. (See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game))

  • Best score: 50
  • Best player score: 56
  • Position: #8 / 48
  • Number of attempts: 5
paste indent correction - JS - 102 entries

You copy some javascript code from a website and paste it into vim, it does not look good!

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #23 / 57
  • Number of attempts: 1
Hole-in-one - 1012 entries

Lets take this golf thing literally.. Drive off the tee into the hole, and of course you don't strike the ball completely clean.

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #5 / 302
  • Number of attempts: 5
It's a factor - 91 entries

Flaunt your macro prowess by factoring some numbers. Too hard? It takes less than 30 strokes, I promise.

  • Best score: 24
  • Best player score: 28
  • Position: #11 / 36
  • Number of attempts: 4
Delete unwanted lines - 396 entries

Delete all lines which does not end in "o.."

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 9
  • Position: #11 / 225
  • Number of attempts: 2
Parsing with CSV: Unify lines and result. - 165 entries

col1;col2;col3;col4 A;1;4;5 A;3;4; A;1;4; # New output: col1;col2;col3;col4 A;1(2x);3;4(3x);5 any ideas?

  • Best score: 21
  • Best player score: 21
  • Position: #18 / 73
  • Number of attempts: 3
Lookahead and Lookbehind - 67 entries

Look everywhere

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 17
  • Position: #6 / 29
  • Number of attempts: 3
Word frequency alignment - 274 entries

You've got to align the second column, but the spacing is inconvenient and there are nasty tabs in the way. If you're a "real Vim ninja," this could be very quick indeed...

  • Best score: 5
  • Best player score: 5
  • Position: #66 / 157
  • Number of attempts: 1
Minimalist Limerick - 516 entries

Reproduce this lovely poem.

  • Best score: 31
  • Best player score: 31
  • Position: #12 / 171
  • Number of attempts: 5
Define to require - 118 entries

When JSHint is enabled, there's a rule that doesn't let you have more than 6 arguments in a function, so the moment you need to add a 7th argument, you need to do a refactoring.

  • Best score: 62
  • Best player score: 62
  • Position: #6 / 48
  • Number of attempts: 2
REDRUM - 150 entries

If you remember "The Shinning", the first time you saw the bloody word REDRUM you probably thinked "What the Hell is that?" Well, then you know that you need a little help from a looking-glass to make sense of it. Now it's time to use vim like a mirror to reveal the message.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #14 / 62
  • Number of attempts: 4
Enumerate words - 250 entries

Enumerate the unique words in order.

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 25
  • Position: #27 / 89
  • Number of attempts: 3
Circle in a square - 140 entries

Probably looks more like "Egg in a rectangle" in most fonts, but it's actually 23x23.

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 23
  • Position: #5 / 52
  • Number of attempts: 6
Block Fun 1 - 189 entries

Manipulate the columns to produce desired result.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #11 / 73
  • Number of attempts: 3
Prefixes and suffixes - 593 entries

Generate all prefixes of "vimchallenge", then all suffixes.

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 26
  • Position: #82 / 193
  • Number of attempts: 2
Refactor arguments into object argument - 161 entries

A relatively common Javascript refactoring.

  • Best score: 48
  • Best player score: 50
  • Position: #5 / 65
  • Number of attempts: 9
abcd > a b c d - 280 entries

transform the single spaces into 4 spaces repeat for each line

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #99 / 218
  • Number of attempts: 1
Readable Rubyhash - 244 entries

Rubyists talk about being cutting edge but how many are using 1.9 in production? Time to convert those verbose 1.8 hashes in to symbolic, succinct 1.9 beauties!

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 26
  • Position: #22 / 92
  • Number of attempts: 3
NATO phonetic alphabet - 501 entries

Transform the series of words into a list.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 19
  • Position: #14 / 191
  • Number of attempts: 6
A simple change - 442 entries

Just change the numbers in the most efficient way ...

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #14 / 189
  • Number of attempts: 5
The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Vim - 401 entries

Someone has vandalized this text file and replaced the beginning character of one word in each line with a Big "X." Please remove the big X's, and fix each line to read "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog."

  • Best score: 8
  • Best player score: 10
  • Position: #56 / 188
  • Number of attempts: 2
The name of the game - 650 entries

End up with the name of the game.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Position: #109 / 356
  • Number of attempts: 1
lamb had a little Mary - 586 entries

"Mary" and "lamb" are swapped. Unswap them. Fast as you can.

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 25
  • Position: #37 / 163
  • Number of attempts: 3
SFD-ROC: vimvimvim - 1581 entries

Oh no, this line is longer than 80 chars... put each 'vim' on a new line.

  • Best score: 8
  • Best player score: 9
  • Position: #176 / 439
  • Number of attempts: 6
Stairs Indenting - 448 entries

Indent each line with <line number> whitespaces.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 13
  • Position: #37 / 193
  • Number of attempts: 4
Python to Ruby - 196 entries

Convert this Python code to Ruby. NOTE: This program likely won't run.

  • Best score: 24
  • Best player score: 25
  • Position: #7 / 59
  • Number of attempts: 5
Cleanining up 80 column concatenated text - 188 entries

1. Put the whole query on one line, remove the concatenation operators 2. Remove the double spaces that appear a few times in the query 3. Use string-interpolated variable statementPid rather than the ugly concatenation

  • Best score: 31
  • Best player score: 33
  • Position: #27 / 76
  • Number of attempts: 3
Saving the hashes(#) - 1992 entries

The following file is copied from vimcasts.org(Its only for learning purpose,hope the site owner doesn't mind it), its probably the easiest of challenges.Our goal is to delete every line which doesn't contain a hash signs. The remaining hash signs with numbers are then sorted to get the final output.

  • Best score: 20
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #8 / 473
  • Number of attempts: 6
Let's play some Ivmgolf - 1091 entries

Oops, I spelled that wrong.

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 9
  • Position: #189 / 441
  • Number of attempts: 2
you're stuck on jQuery < 1.7 - 337 entries

replace calls to jQuery 1.7+'s `on` with calls to pre 1.7 `bind`

  • Best score: 25
  • Best player score: 27
  • Position: #41 / 111
  • Number of attempts: 2
Vertical Limit - 2448 entries

transform a succession of one word lines to a an array of strings

  • Best score: 21
  • Best player score: 23
  • Position: #206 / 738
  • Number of attempts: 3
Exchanging Quotes - 821 entries

Sometimes you need to exchange a choice of quotes in some code.

  • Best score: 30
  • Best player score: 31
  • Position: #31 / 225
  • Number of attempts: 6
replacing each line of a block selection - 2947 entries

replace each line's ../assets/js with /javascripts

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #246 / 768
  • Number of attempts: 3
Switch function arguments - 2082 entries

How to switch two arguments of a function.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #231 / 652
  • Number of attempts: 1
Append semicolon after expressions - 1005 entries

Some lines need the semicolon, some don't.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Position: #42 / 403
  • Number of attempts: 3
Reverse and double space - 489 entries

Reverse the order of the given lines and double space everything

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #46 / 194
  • Number of attempts: 4
Remove noise from HTTP log - 695 entries

This piece of log (from the year 2000) contains some irrelevant data. We only want to see the HTTP method and resource.

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #67 / 270
  • Number of attempts: 2
Remove semicolons after expressions - 628 entries

A follow-up for http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4fc9d767d3a0d4000100000e.

  • Best score: 6
  • Best player score: 6
  • Position: #63 / 258
  • Number of attempts: 2
switch variable - 5036 entries

how fast can you switch two variable ?

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Position: #159 / 1736
  • Number of attempts: 2
The meaning - 558 entries

Numbers are fun!

  • Best score: 5
  • Best player score: 5
  • Position: #186 / 356
  • Number of attempts: 1
Ugly spreadsheet copy/paste to CSV - 973 entries

convert an ugly spreadsheet copy/paste into a CSV format.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 22
  • Position: #55 / 185
  • Number of attempts: 2
Replacing some words - 419 entries

How fast could it be?

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 17
  • Position: #21 / 148
  • Number of attempts: 3
Make it more readable - 1952 entries

Insert blank lines to make it more organized and readable

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 15
  • Position: #247 / 640
  • Number of attempts: 3
remove dupes from array - 1336 entries

given a random string that contains a ruby-esque array, make sure that there are no duplicate elements

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 17
  • Position: #48 / 331
  • Number of attempts: 6
PHP Array Syntax -> MailChimp Merge Syntax - 507 entries

I recently needed to send an e-mail to our marketing department listing allowed merge tags for our MailChimp campaigns. The allowed merge tags were determined from a PHP array in one of our PHP classes. I transformed the PHP class to MailChimp's syntax and sent the e-mail. It was, however, a long, laborious process. I'm still fairly new to Vim and would love to see how an expert Vim user would tackle one of my own, real-world problems. Thanks and have fun!

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 25
  • Position: #52 / 148
  • Number of attempts: 3
imports alignment (python) - 661 entries

Align as one import per line.

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #86 / 194
  • Number of attempts: 1
HTML to Haml - 842 entries

Help convert this HTML page to Haml.

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 23
  • Position: #5 / 202
  • Number of attempts: 5
Numbering a List - 1859 entries

Pretty simple, number the list.

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 19
  • Position: #234 / 639
  • Number of attempts: 4
Ruby 1.9 hashes - 1221 entries

Rubyists talk about being cutting edge but how many are using 1.9 in production? Time to convert those verbose 1.8 hashes in to symbolic, succinct 1.9 beauties!

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #53 / 401
  • Number of attempts: 4
Assignment Alignment - 832 entries

line up the operators. Use spaces, not tabs.

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 18
  • Position: #33 / 215
  • Number of attempts: 3
Shebangs for all - 1912 entries

We've all seen or used a shebang once or twice. Ditch the specific paths and leave just a dynamic Ruby and Python bath behind.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Position: #10 / 500
  • Number of attempts: 3
A Simple One - 1001 entries

Here is a very simple one - just to illustrate/introduce a vim feature that some people seem to miss...

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 9
  • Position: #328 / 643
  • Number of attempts: 1
Ruby 1.9 compat - 610 entries

Remember when Ruby supported `when <expr> :`? Well, it doesn't in 1.9, so let's make sure we use `then`, without ruining our lovely new hash syntax!

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #40 / 230
  • Number of attempts: 4
Reverse Simple Deletion - 832 entries

You did the simple deletion, now reverse it.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 12
  • Position: #269 / 454
  • Number of attempts: 2
The Cake is a Lie - 1286 entries

Correct the capitalization of each word

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 9
  • Position: #146 / 512
  • Number of attempts: 3
Make Fancy Header - 1014 entries

Make the header text stand out with surrounding asterisks

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 16
  • Position: #73 / 338
  • Number of attempts: 3
Reformat most common surnames - 647 entries

Reformat copy-pasted table into a list of the most common surnames

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 23
  • Position: #9 / 198
  • Number of attempts: 6
Change the content of a string - 1476 entries

This docstring is a complete lie. Fix it.

  • Best score: 22
  • Best player score: 22
  • Position: #111 / 558
  • Number of attempts: 4
Sort and add attributes - 1327 entries

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

  • Best score: 33
  • Best player score: 33
  • Position: #158 / 529
  • Number of attempts: 3
Reconstruct the Sentence - 1369 entries

Get the sentence back in the proper order, remove duplicate lines, and then combine the separate lines into one.

  • Best score: 20
  • Best player score: 20
  • Position: #82 / 384
  • Number of attempts: 6
Braces or Brackets? - 884 entries

Someone forgot whether to use braces or brackets and you have to clean up their code!

  • Best score: 34
  • Best player score: 34
  • Position: #16 / 288
  • Number of attempts: 9
Whitespace, empty lines and tabs - 3339 entries

Convert tabs to spaces, strip empty lines and trailing whitespace.

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 17
  • Position: #79 / 736
  • Number of attempts: 6
Flodder-challenge - 1118 entries

Replace the text the most efficient and win!

  • Best score: 27
  • Best player score: 28
  • Position: #59 / 311
  • Number of attempts: 7
Simple text editing with Vim - 12290 entries

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

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 14
  • Position: #1052 / 3581
  • Number of attempts: 3
Reformat/Refactor a Golfer Class - 6560 entries

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

  • Best score: 32
  • Best player score: 32
  • Position: #60 / 1616
  • Number of attempts: 6
Bradd Szonye
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entered into 80 challenges

contributed 0 challenges