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]

37405 active golfers, 445788 entries, 561 challenges

Open VimGolf challenges

Piphilology - 131 entries

Piphilology comprises the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember a span of digits of the mathematical constant π. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology

Mess in revision history - 1160 entries

Help Joe clean up what Steve has cobbled.

Vim tetris - 352 entries

Vim can play tetris too!

Five Pillars - 62 entries

Arrange all words in a table with 5 columns. The minimal space between words in columns is 2 spaces. Columns do have varying width.

Write Setters and Getters for PHP - 86 entries

Just simple automation of writing Setters and Getters like Doctrine might use.

Carriage return - 42 entries

I have some raw data from terminal output which uses carriege return for formatting. Carriage return sets the pointer to the first character on the line, and subsequent characters will overwrite what was there before. The challange is to simulate the terminal behaviour in vim. I'm kind of unsure if I should have skipped lines 9 and 15, since there might be some interesting solutions which are not that generic. Happy Golfing!

A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 ! - 10624 entries

A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 !

O Christmas Tree - 108 entries

Design a macro that makes trees grow (or ASCII triangles, if that's too hard).

Going underground.... - 339 entries

Simple reformatting: in this case changing from the format London underground supplies its customers with, to the format that Google Calendar likes...

Permutations N=4 - 60 entries

Could use backtracking or other algorithm to generate sorted numbers. Second chance !

Split the words - 356 entries

Add the spaces manually if you must, but if you use Vim's spell checking feature wisely, I think you'll save a LARGE number of strokes.

Create Leading Zeros - 238 entries

Create leading zeros only for id columns. Please use generic approach!

attr_aligner - 3444 entries

Two attr keywords. Two separate indentations. Align the colons.

Ninjas Leaderboard - 85 entries

The two lines in "Start file" has an obfuscated email address. Second line give an index (from 1 to 30) to the chars list of the first line, for example, the first char of email (n) is in position 25, second char (i) is in position 19 and s.o.

Under the cupola - 47 entries

Taking some liberty about the name and plot of the Stephen King's famous novel (and TV series) to make this challenge. Are you able to recreate graphically the key phrase of the story? (I think is gonna be hard!)

Untangle my tail, please! - 57 entries

You know, this words were playing to chase their tails and Oops! What happened? Now we have a complete mess, their tails are totally tangled, can you please help them to untangle their tails?

Letter case trickery - 1594 entries

This file is in a downright esoteric format, consisting of hexadecimal numbers, non-hexadecimal keywords, and "Z" indicating end-of-line. Make the hexadecimal numbers lowercase.

Recursive Cowsay - 58 entries

Convert 'cowsay' statement to recursive output

VimGolfNight - 536 entries

Based on "The name of the game".

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 :)

Counting in binary - 477 entries

"a" represents 0; "A" represents 1. Start from zero and count to 15.

Hanging Indent for Footnotes - 69 entries

Format this footnote (in kramdown syntax) so that it has hanging indent.

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.

Delete unwanted lines - 396 entries

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

Pairs of numbers - 360 entries

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

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

Assign list - 169 entries

Assign list elements to matrix

Across-Down Flip - 53 entries

Do this instead of the Sunday crossword.

Number an outline - 249 entries

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

Change The Perspective - 36 entries

This is a go game recodes file(.sgf file, refer to http://www.red-bean.com/sgf/). It base on such a coordinate system: in vertical direction, is from top(farthest end) to bottom, mark as a,b,c,...,s(19*19 board); in horizontal direction, is from left to right, uses the same notations. For Example, the coordinate notation 'cq', is the position at the bottom-left corner(vertical coordinate first). The record is from one player's perspective. We need to change to another's, but we don't want to change coordinate system, let it keep top to bottom and left to right. so we have to change the coordinates, a <-> s, b <-> r,c <-> q, etc. the Position 'cq', as transformation, it will be 'qd'.

paste indent correction - JS - 102 entries

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

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))

Words in parens - 12854 entries

We should all ace this, right?

Lookahead and Lookbehind - 67 entries

Look everywhere

It's a factor - 91 entries

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

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!

Extended Customer 2 - 47 entries

Format the chars

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?

Fibonacci Triangles - 49 entries

Triangles

199 Fibonacci Numbers - 39 entries

Generate 199 Fibonacci Numbers using, if you like, the function S(x,y), a vimscript to sum two big numbers in reverse order.

Refactor arguments into object argument - 161 entries

A relatively common Javascript refactoring.

vim = 22 / 7 - 447 entries

pi square vim

Chinese Multiplication Table - 77 entries

Print a Chinese multiplication table in Vim. In China, every kid is asked to memorize this table. And thanks to the mono-syllabism of Chinese characters, it is not that hard. Printing the multiplication table is also a good exercise for programming beginners. For-loop, escaped characters, etc... There should be some special ways to print it in Vim.

LaTeX to XML Math Delimiters - 40 entries

Vim is amazing when used to edit MediaWiki text, but typing "<math> . . . </math>" can be tiresome and frustrating if formulas are used often. LaTeX delimiters are so concise and even come in two flavors: "\( . . . \)" for inline math and "\[ . . . \]" for centered formulas. The goal is to perform the following conversions: "\( . . . \)" becomes "<math>. . .</math>" "\[ . . . \]" becomes "<center><math>. . .</math></center>"

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.

Minimalist Limerick - 516 entries

Reproduce this lovely poem.

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.

Word frequency alignment - 273 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...

Circle in a square - 140 entries

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

Execute immediate SQL - 85 entries

Sql string tranformation ...

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