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SwellJoe
Where are the solutions? That's the fun thing about Perl golf is seeing how people did it in X characters. Without solutions...well, I don't see the point.
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igrigorik
I'm logging the solutions, but in real MVP fashion... not showing them just yet. Need to bootstrap a vimscript parser first.

If anyone is up for it, would love some help with the client/parser: https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf

Complete
I will take part in this when the solutions are displayed. All the fun is in the solutions. So for me, hiding them kills the whole point of the project. Otherwise it would be lots of fun. Im a long time vim user and love it.
silentbicycle
I think Project Euler has a good compromise - you can see (and comment on!) solutions once you've successfully passed some baseline. Then you don't feel like you cheated, but can pick apart their solutions, now that you've already focused on that problem for a while.

I've learned a LOT figuring out how some outstanding PE submissions worked, translating their algorithms to my favorite languages.

preek
MVP meaning 'Most Valuable Player'?
Groxx
"Maximum reVivification Potential" gets my vote.
rue
Is the parser for deconstructing the solutions? That'd be a useful feature to have along with the solutions themselves.
snprbob86
Do you really need to do anything super smart with them? Could you at least link to the logged scripts as files? Smarter stuff can come later.
Bud
This is one of the most wonderfully geeky things I have ever seen. The analogy to golf is exceptionally well-drawn, too! It might be entertaining if you developed the parallel even more, perhaps by adapting some of The Rules of Golf to your project.
DEinspanjer
Ugh.. wanted to play with it, but after three years, there still isn't a simple way to get Ruby and Gems working nicely with modern Ruby apps on OSX. Searching for ways to update show a variety of hacks, each uglier than the last. Of course, I could always build it from source.. ::sigh::
luigi
Not sure what you mean, as the vast majority of Ruby developers I know use OS X. Ruby works out of the box on Snow Leopard. Or try Homebrew. Or RVM.
DEinspanjer
I'm running an MBP received a clean install of the first Snow Leopard release and has subsequently gone through the normal system updates. On this system, and the previous one that was running 10.5, I've never managed to get RubyGems updated successfully.. hence, when I try to gem install vimgolf, it tells me that I need rubygems >=1.3.6. I guess I'm just failing as a hacker and missing something obvious. Grr.

Well, I just discovered that I had two different conflicting gem home dirs. was able to set GEM_HOME and do "gem cleanup" and things seem to be a bit better now. Yay!

kunley
Just mercifully ignore OSX-shipped Ruby and go with Ruby from ports, homebrew, vanilla-source install. Or just use RVM.
steveklabnik
I use rvm on OSX every day, Ruby would be worse without it.

I'm going to sorely miss it when I start working in other languages again.

gfodor
Anyone else having problems signing in? I connected my twitter account but its still thinking I'm not logged in.
luigi
I want to go head to head with someone in match play.
steveklabnik
DJ Hero has a great feature where after you beat a song, you can "Challenge a friend" and it sends a message to them that says something along the lines of "Steve just scored 200,000 points on $SONG_NAME. Can you do better? OK/CANCEL/ABORT"
Symmetry
Lets see, for the simple text editing: qa/vim<ENTER>yypjddq@a@a so 18.
Complete
qa/v<ENTER>yypjddq@a@a

16 :P

Symmetry
qa/v<ENTER>yypJDq@a@a

15

Xurinos
Isn't that 19? Shift key...
gfodor
Nice!

qa/v<ENTER>YpJDq@a@a

Symmetry
Arg, the fact that Y and yy are synonyms always messes me up. Why can't it be like c/C/cc and d/D/dd?
lelele
Because then it would be consistent ;-)

Of course I have remapped Y to be consistent with C, D, etc.

Xurinos
If this contest also rated by finger distance (one of vim's strengths), I'd propose qq and @q@@ instead of using the "a" register.
BrandonM
Agreed. I'm surprised by all the "qa"s I'm seeing. I've always used "qq" for quick macros and kind of assumed everyone else did as well. It's especially convenient considering that @ and q are right next to each other on a qwerty layout.
burgerbrain
Yeah, how does this prevent somebody from making a macro that does the entire file, then "completing" the file with the two* keystrokes it takes to fire off that macro?

Or one, mapping space to @q is convenient :)

BrandonM
qq3jYpJDq@q@@

13

Edit: I can trim one more off, to make it 12:

qq3jYpJDq2@q

Complete
Awesome! You are currently the winner!
BrandonM
To be fair, I borrowed from a couple others here, but that was generally the approach I had in mind.

Of course, we aren't genuinely doing what the author intended. The point was not to copy-paste the line, but actually to perform what would be rather typical edits. I also was rather lucky that the file happened to be structured such that "3j" put the cursor in the right place each time.

It's also not clear whether or not the three times SHIFT must be pressed ("JD" = push and hold SHIFT = one press) should be counted as additional keystrokes.

The contest would have been better with a "tee" file and a "hole" file, stipulating that edits should be performed on the former in order to produce the latter.

jjcm
As the scoring currently stands, it doesn't seem to count shift presses. It does count escapes though.
meastham
Kinda a bummer for those of us who don't use twitter..

Edit: Still a very cool project though

meastham
Is there anything to stop people form just writing a macro beforehand that does each task? I'm guessing that's how the guy who 4 keystrokes on Simple Text Editing accomplished that.
gfodor
The people submitting scores of 4 are probably just adding macros to their .vimrc
gfodor
OP: can you figure out a way to get vim to not load vimrc?
duck
They just fixed that.
devin
I had an idea for an emacs version of this.

Anyone have any ideas on how you'd implement this with emacs?

jlongster
My emacs-fu is pretty stale, but I'm sure it has the hooks to track what you need. Although, Emacs isn't all about keystrokes, it's more about interactive coding and an integrated development environment.

Maybe you could do something more along the lines of Perl golf, where you achieve certain things in as little code as possible.

lelele
What? Viewing/counting keystrokes? Then "C-h l".
aerique
Perhaps Xah Lee's command frequencies script is a start?
silentbicycle
You could check keystrokes used with C-h l (or M-x view-lossage), but Emacs's whole design is based on extensibility rather than terse, orthogonal, and (usually) single-key commands. Don't find a clever way to knock it down to 30 keystrokes (or whatever) - when you notice a common operation, script it, name it, bind it, now it's two or three keystrokes.
clvv
Until somebody can come up with at least some method of restricting vim scripting, the results are useless(one can easily only use 4 key strokes by key mapping as you can see). But, on the other hand, you can't just disable vim from loading scripts, because there's no point in mastering the plain old vim without any plugins, custom key mappings and such.
askedrelic
I've been trying with editing the file in another editor, then :e! :wq which seems to give 17/18 score mostly.

I love this idea and love the challenge, but would love to make it less hackable as well.

zacharycohn
Hey! You demo'd this to me at Beer && Code a few weeks ago. Good to see this has come along!
exogen
Heh, that was me, and this is actually a completely independent project. Mine's still coming along, and I think it's an improvement.
exogen
Ha, I just started working on the same exact project a few weeks ago. Great minds think alike, I guess. I'm taking a different approach, so I'll still launch it to see what people think.

I brought up this idea in a "gamification of software development" talk I gave last April.

neilk
Unbelievable. I had this exact same idea. Get out of my mind!
Calamitous
Me too. :) This is a much, much nicer implementation than anything I had in mind, though,
eterps
Any tips on improving 'Sort and add attributes'?

I have scored 38 with:

:sor<ENTER>:%s/)/, :country => "USA")/<ENTER>

clvv
I think this is the shortest solution unless someone has sort mapped to hot-keys, which is unlikely.
birken
:sor|%s/)/, :country => "USA")<ENTER> works for me

This shaves off a few chars: a) combining the commands b) leaving off the last / in the search/replace

DEinspanjer
This one gives a score of 32, but I like it just for the sheer one-liner obsfucatedness:

  :g/#/+1s/\v(.*)\n.*/\1\r\1
jjcm
You should really make some challenges that require the users to pass multiple tests with the same script. Sure, you can solve the reformat/refactor challenge by

    jd2jVjj=f(ci)*a^]jcfda.join(',')^]
but it wont generalize anywhere. Having a full script though that will detect and do that automagically, now there's the fun part.
jjcm 

    4JD=Gjwci(*a^]jcfda.join(',')^]
God this is addicting. Shaved off a few characters.

edit: switch the first three letters to j3D, as 4JD seems to work differently between my two machines.

callahad
I held the title on "Brackets or Braces?" [0] for a good seven minutes with a 44 character solution [1], only to be ousted by @ryanmusicman with 42. Can anyone see an obvious way to improve mine?

[0]: http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1a522ea860b7447200010b

[1]: https://gist.github.com/757767

clvv
A quick thought: use surround.vim plugin for this.
callahad
Sadly, that's not allowed :(
graywh
Which kind of defeats the purpose. I use Vim plugins to reduce my keystrokes.
lelele
I agree that all users rely on plugins for doing real work. However, seeing how much can be accomplished by using just vanilla features can be enlightening.
seles
You can also use Vi for hundreds of challenges at http://golf.shinh.org alot of the newer challenges are stale but some of the older ones are gold.
jjcm
Different game, that's counting the resulting code that you create. This is counting the number of keystrokes to create the code (for some at least).
jjcm
FizzBuzz: (score: 71)

    i1^]
    qaYp
    CTRL+a
    q98@aggjjqaA Fizz^]
    3jq32@agg:5
    ENTER
    qaA Buzz^]
    5jq19@a:%s/z B/zB/
    ENTER
    ZZ
psadauskas
You don't need the "gg" (move to top) before ":5" (go to line 5)
jjcm
Right, I'm an idiot. Good catch - likewise the ggjj earlier can just be :3[enter]
graywh
3G is better
clvv
who voted this down? 3G is obviously 2 key stokes while :3<CR> is 3
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clvv
You can achieve even less key strokes if you have your vim automatically removes trailing spaces, which is a neat feature itself and a common hack.

autocmd BufWritePre * :%s/\s\+$//

53 is the least I got.

Calamitous
This awesomeness unexpectedly sucked away half my afternoon. Not really sure whether to be upset about it our not. :)

Only thing is that the key counting doesn't seem to be consistent. :\ Using the command history seems to really, really screw with the counts. I thought it counted up all the characters in the submitted command, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I submitted an 18 for the "Sort and add attributes" challenge, then realized that the text for the new key is longer than that. :\

I'm not really clear on what "counts" as a keypress (shift key? colon for commands? Paste commands? Esc?) and I haven't been able to get any of my "scores" to match up with the count in my head.

All that aside, this is a barrel of fun, and I'm sure these kinks will get worked out.

Calamitous
Also, it would be awesome if I could delete some of my scores. :\ My bogus win and early attempts are cluttering up the leaderboard.