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]

34603 active golfers, 418898 entries, 548 challenges

Open VimGolf challenges

Ninjas Leaderboard - 84 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 - 45 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 - 1580 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 - 520 entries

Based on "The name of the game".

quotes inside quotes - 3077 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 - 443 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 - 985 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 - 390 entries

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

Pairs of numbers - 347 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 - 166 entries

Assign list elements to matrix

Across-Down Flip - 53 entries

Do this instead of the Sunday crossword.

Number an outline - 246 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 - 97 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 - 12788 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 - 340 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 - 44 entries

Format the chars

Parsing with CSV: Unify lines and result. - 164 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 - 37 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 - 160 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 - 510 entries

Reproduce this lovely poem.

Saving the hashes(#) - 1973 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 - 258 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 - 135 entries

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

Execute immediate SQL - 84 entries

Sql string tranformation ...

Prefixes and suffixes - 576 entries

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

Coordinates placeholder - 61 entries

Place coordinates instead of target search.

XML to JSON - 44 entries

Convert this xml file into json.

Change your calendar - 349 entries

Happy New Year!

Greek Letters - 60 entries

Starting with a list of Greek letters, create a cross-reference table showing all of the Greek alpha-beta. You'll likely need to use digraphs (:help digraphs). Note that while most digraphs can be entered with either character first, lowercase sigma has two digraphs -- s* AND *s! Good luck!

Transposition - 73 entries

Transpose the original lines in separate columns, one for each line.

REDRUM - 147 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.

Enumerate words - 241 entries

Enumerate the unique words in order.

Swap assigned value - 577 entries

Simple problem but looking for interesting solutions.

Groups magic - 144 entries

Regexp or macros for string converting: (a) -> ___ (abc) -> ____ (abcd) -> ______ All in the '(' replace to _ multiply by char count + ()

Block Fun 1 - 187 entries

Manipulate the columns to produce desired result.

fib.c cleanup - 65 entries

cleanup the file

Harder than "abcd > a b c d" - 76 entries

Not as easy as the last challenge. This time, just one space between a and b, up to 25 spaces between y and z. (Removed some lines; diff was too long.)

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