Real Vim ninjas count every keystroke - do you?

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

Changelog, Rules & FAQ, updates: @vimgolf, RSS.

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

Played Challenges

Simple, Practical, and Common - 32691 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: 24
  • Number of attempts: 6
vim = 22 / 7 - 408 entries

pi square vim

  • Best score: 20
  • Best player score: 41
  • Number of attempts: 1
V to the i - 4595 entries

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

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 8
  • Number of attempts: 1
Add semicolons - 10415 entries

Simply add a semicolon at the end of each line

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 11
  • Number of attempts: 1
Wrap the text of an email message to 79 characters - 521 entries

You're replying to an email with silly long lines. Clean them up.

  • Best score: 5
  • Best player score: 6
  • Number of attempts: 1
Search and Replace 0 - 4524 entries

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

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 16
  • Number of attempts: 2
Just the middle - 11074 entries

Delete the instructions at the top and bottom.

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 9
  • Number of attempts: 1
Interweave two blocks of text - 530 entries

Suppose you've got data on a list of things from multiple sources. They're all in separate chunks, so how might you create a tabular output?

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 20
  • Number of attempts: 3
Python Hello World! Reformatting - 860 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: 43
  • Number of attempts: 3
Vice versa - 7390 entries

Little role switching.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 15
  • Number of attempts: 4
comments galore - 950 entries

Basic comment reformatting

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 10
  • Number of attempts: 1
Replace and keep the case - 389 entries

Replace all instance of plugin and Plugin to device and Device.

  • Best score: 26
  • Best player score: 28
  • Number of attempts: 4
Swap assigned value - 525 entries

Simple problem but looking for interesting solutions.

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 11
  • Number of attempts: 2
Change your calendar - 278 entries

Happy New Year!

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 42
  • Number of attempts: 1
VimGolfNight - 482 entries

Based on "The name of the game".

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Number of attempts: 1
ASCII box - 304 entries

Don't forget to fix typos!

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 30
  • Number of attempts: 3
Sorting database text output - 194 entries

Sometimes it is nice to be able to quickly take column-formatted text output from the SQL command line and turn it into a list of useful data. In this case we want a unique, sorted list of the values from the second column combined into one comma-separated list. What is the fewest strokes you can do this in?

  • Best score: 24
  • Best player score: 26
  • Number of attempts: 5
I forgot quotes - 15637 entries

Oops.

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 14
  • Number of attempts: 2
Suffix sort - 195 entries

Sort from the end of the line, as if the letters in each line were reversed.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 28
  • Number of attempts: 2
Vim tetris - 347 entries

Vim can play tetris too!

  • Best score: 21
  • Best player score: 30
  • Number of attempts: 1
Mess in revision history - 1117 entries

Help Joe clean up what Steve has cobbled.

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 18
  • Number of attempts: 5
A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 ! - 10509 entries

A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014 !

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 12
  • Number of attempts: 5
attr_aligner - 3347 entries

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

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 28
  • Number of attempts: 4
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!)

  • Best score: 33
  • Best player score: 144
  • Number of attempts: 4
Counting in binary - 405 entries

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

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 47
  • Number of attempts: 3
Letter case trickery - 1515 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.

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 13
  • Number of attempts: 3
Untangle my tail, please! - 45 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?

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 18
  • Number of attempts: 3
quotes inside quotes - 2996 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: 3
  • Best player score: 15
  • Number of attempts: 5
Hanging Indent for Footnotes - 58 entries

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

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 27
  • Number of attempts: 3
Recursive Cowsay - 58 entries

Convert 'cowsay' statement to recursive output

  • Best score: 33
  • Best player score: 80
  • Number of attempts: 1
Top X - 185 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: 26
  • Number of attempts: 3
Sort the VimGolf challenges by popularity - 324 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: 18
  • Number of attempts: 3
Number an outline - 210 entries

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

  • Best score: 25
  • Best player score: 33
  • Number of attempts: 5
Words in parens - 12676 entries

We should all ace this, right?

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 15
  • Number of attempts: 8
Pairs of numbers - 340 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: 31
  • Number of attempts: 6
Assign list - 146 entries

Assign list elements to matrix

  • Best score: 30
  • Best player score: 49
  • Number of attempts: 2
paste indent correction - JS - 83 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: 18
  • Number of attempts: 1
Hole-in-one - 963 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: 29
  • Number of attempts: 1
It's a factor - 80 entries

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

  • Best score: 25
  • Best player score: 92
  • Number of attempts: 1
Delete unwanted lines - 350 entries

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

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 9
  • Number of attempts: 3
Parsing with CSV: Unify lines and result. - 163 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: 24
  • Number of attempts: 2
Lookahead and Lookbehind - 65 entries

Look everywhere

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 20
  • Number of attempts: 3
Word frequency alignment - 225 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: 6
  • Number of attempts: 1
Minimalist Limerick - 500 entries

Reproduce this lovely poem.

  • Best score: 31
  • Best player score: 37
  • Number of attempts: 3
REDRUM - 139 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: 34
  • Number of attempts: 1
Enumerate words - 226 entries

Enumerate the unique words in order.

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 30
  • Number of attempts: 1
Block Fun 1 - 161 entries

Manipulate the columns to produce desired result.

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 23
  • Number of attempts: 2
Groups magic - 140 entries

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

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 14
  • Number of attempts: 1
Prefixes and suffixes - 533 entries

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

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 27
  • Number of attempts: 2
Refactor arguments into object argument - 159 entries

A relatively common Javascript refactoring.

  • Best score: 48
  • Best player score: 78
  • Number of attempts: 1
abcd > a b c d - 249 entries

transform the single spaces into 4 spaces repeat for each line

  • Best score: 15
  • Best player score: 15
  • Number of attempts: 5
Readable Rubyhash - 233 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: 27
  • Number of attempts: 4
Dehamlizing - 156 entries

Change this piece of HAML code back into erb

  • Best score: 32
  • Best player score: 41
  • Number of attempts: 2
NATO phonetic alphabet - 438 entries

Transform the series of words into a list.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 21
  • Number of attempts: 2
A simple change - 377 entries

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

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 12
  • Number of attempts: 2
The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Vim - 352 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: 10
  • Best player score: 11
  • Number of attempts: 3
The name of the game - 597 entries

End up with the name of the game.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Number of attempts: 2
lamb had a little Mary - 538 entries

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

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 35
  • Number of attempts: 4
SFD-ROC: vimvimvim - 1441 entries

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

  • Best score: 8
  • Best player score: 9
  • Number of attempts: 6
Stairs Indenting - 387 entries

Indent each line with <line number> whitespaces.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 14
  • Number of attempts: 1
Unwrap the text of an email message - 154 entries

Reverse of "Wrap the text of an email message to 79 characters". gq and gw are great for wrapping paragraphs. But sometimes other programs choke on your wrapped lines. What's the best way to un-gq?

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 29
  • Number of attempts: 1
Python to Ruby - 188 entries

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

  • Best score: 24
  • Best player score: 41
  • Number of attempts: 2
Cleanining up 80 column concatenated text - 185 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: 43
  • Number of attempts: 2
Saving the hashes(#) - 1921 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: 25
  • Number of attempts: 6
Let's play some Ivmgolf - 976 entries

Oops, I spelled that wrong.

  • Best score: 7
  • Best player score: 9
  • Number of attempts: 1
you're stuck on jQuery < 1.7 - 325 entries

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

  • Best score: 25
  • Best player score: 32
  • Number of attempts: 1
Vertical Limit - 2294 entries

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

  • Best score: 21
  • Best player score: 24
  • Number of attempts: 4
Exchanging Quotes - 779 entries

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

  • Best score: 30
  • Best player score: 38
  • Number of attempts: 1
replacing each line of a block selection - 2740 entries

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

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 23
  • Number of attempts: 5
Switch function arguments - 1919 entries

How to switch two arguments of a function.

  • Best score: 3
  • Best player score: 13
  • Number of attempts: 3
Append semicolon after expressions - 899 entries

Some lines need the semicolon, some don't.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 11
  • Number of attempts: 4
Reverse and double space - 424 entries

Reverse the order of the given lines and double space everything

  • Best score: 14
  • Best player score: 17
  • Number of attempts: 1
Remove noise from HTTP log - 631 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: 17
  • Number of attempts: 1
switch variable - 4863 entries

how fast can you switch two variable ?

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 13
  • Number of attempts: 3
The meaning - 515 entries

Numbers are fun!

  • Best score: 5
  • Best player score: 5
  • Number of attempts: 2
Ugly spreadsheet copy/paste to CSV - 787 entries

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

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 39
  • Number of attempts: 5
Replacing some words - 405 entries

How fast could it be?

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 35
  • Number of attempts: 5
Make it more readable - 1847 entries

Insert blank lines to make it more organized and readable

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 16
  • Number of attempts: 3
Line Zipper - 403 entries

Zip/pair related lines.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 16
  • Number of attempts: 1
remove dupes from array - 1260 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: 24
  • Number of attempts: 6
PHP Array Syntax -> MailChimp Merge Syntax - 440 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: 31
  • Number of attempts: 1
Case preserving word replacement - 397 entries

Half way through my project, my people turned into dogs. Now I have to change everything in my source.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 20
  • Number of attempts: 4
Sort entries based on date - 315 entries

Sort some entries in a Ledger-file based on date.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 15
  • Number of attempts: 3
imports alignment (python) - 586 entries

Align as one import per line.

  • Best score: 17
  • Best player score: 27
  • Number of attempts: 2
Rotating Philosophers Problem - 367 entries

Can you help the philosophers find a good place to sit before they get five forks and spaghetti?

  • Best score: 29
  • Best player score: 31
  • Number of attempts: 3
HTML to Haml - 759 entries

Help convert this HTML page to Haml.

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 52
  • Number of attempts: 2
Generate English Alphabets - 425 entries

Start with a, get up to z.

  • Best score: 19
  • Best player score: 25
  • Number of attempts: 2
Insert a Markdown link - 398 entries

Put a link in a markdown document, using the after-the-paragraph format.

  • Best score: 22
  • Best player score: 25
  • Number of attempts: 3
Numbering a List - 1774 entries

Pretty simple, number the list.

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 21
  • Number of attempts: 4
Ruby 1.9 hashes - 1113 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: 15
  • Number of attempts: 3
Assignment Alignment - 722 entries

line up the operators. Use spaces, not tabs.

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 25
  • Number of attempts: 2
Shebangs for all - 1718 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: 13
  • Number of attempts: 8
A Simple One - 870 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
  • Number of attempts: 2
Ruby 1.9 compat - 566 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
  • Number of attempts: 2
Reverse Simple Deletion - 739 entries

You did the simple deletion, now reverse it.

  • Best score: 11
  • Best player score: 12
  • Number of attempts: 1
Increment, increment, increment.... - 531 entries

Vim likes macros

  • Best score: 10
  • Best player score: 12
  • Number of attempts: 1
Sorting paragraphs - 456 entries

Order the paragraphs correctly, per prefixed index

  • Best score: 18
  • Best player score: 23
  • Number of attempts: 5
Indentation - 420 entries

Indent each line according to the right number of spaces it needs.

  • Best score: 21
  • Best player score: 26
  • Number of attempts: 1
Hatsuyume - 368 entries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsuyume

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 27
  • Number of attempts: 1
The Cake is a Lie - 1168 entries

Correct the capitalization of each word

  • Best score: 9
  • Best player score: 11
  • Number of attempts: 3
Context insensitive completion 0 - 461 entries

Buried in the lines you're not supposed to add is the line "Add this line!" Add that line to the top of the file.

  • Best score: 6
  • Best player score: 8
  • Number of attempts: 1
Make Fancy Header - 929 entries

Make the header text stand out with surrounding asterisks

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 25
  • Number of attempts: 2
Reformat some Python - 534 entries

Fix some very bizarrely laid-out code.

  • Best score: 34
  • Best player score: 37
  • Number of attempts: 3
Reformat a C golf submission - 492 entries

Take this C golf submission (for the "tiny but standards-compliant Hello World program" category, naturally), and turn it into formatted C code.

  • Best score: 22
  • Best player score: 34
  • Number of attempts: 2
Reverse characters in a line - 602 entries

You have everything you need, just not in the right order. Mastermind would give you 26 white pegs.

  • Best score: 12
  • Best player score: 13
  • Number of attempts: 2
Reformat most common surnames - 540 entries

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

  • Best score: 23
  • Best player score: 30
  • Number of attempts: 1
Remember FizzBuzz? - 548 entries

Output FizzBuzz to 100. Start with nothing.

  • Best score: 39
  • Best player score: 59
  • Number of attempts: 2
Change the content of a string - 1270 entries

This docstring is a complete lie. Fix it.

  • Best score: 22
  • Best player score: 23
  • Number of attempts: 3
Sort and add attributes - 1113 entries

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

  • Best score: 33
  • Best player score: 33
  • Number of attempts: 1
Add fold markers to a .c file - 447 entries

Fold markers can make it easier to navigate source code. Add them to this .c file.

  • Best score: 30
  • Best player score: 34
  • Number of attempts: 3
Reconstruct the Sentence - 1042 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: 24
  • Number of attempts: 2
Braces or Brackets? - 644 entries

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

  • Best score: 34
  • Best player score: 40
  • Number of attempts: 2
Whitespace, empty lines and tabs - 2762 entries

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

  • Best score: 16
  • Best player score: 22
  • Number of attempts: 9
Simple text editing with Vim - 11334 entries

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

  • Best score: 13
  • Best player score: 17
  • Number of attempts: 2
Reformat/Refactor a Golfer Class - 5782 entries

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

  • Best score: 32
  • Best player score: 36
  • Number of attempts: 7
brett
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entered into 115 challenges

contributed 0 challenges