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Vim Golf

17:59 Tue 28 Dec 2010
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That’s right, a competition to do edits in Vim in a few keystrokes as possible. I haven’t even installed it yet and I’m sure it’ll eat large chunks of my time.

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3 Responses to “Vim Golf”

  1. Seth Milliken Says:

    Could be lots of fun, but they really need to plug the exploits. It’s far too easy to game it right now, and that really takes the away the fun of the leaderboards. As an example, they could force the use of rvim to prevent reading in a prepared solution—a prepared solution which might as well be a symlink to ~/.vimgolf/put/${challenge_id}.output with a one letter name, effectively making the “solution” to every challenge more or less exactly the same: dG:r r<CR>kdd:wq

    Come to think of it, the only real fix is to include a transcript of the keystrokes used in a challenge to allow for independent verification. That’s really the only way to make it pedagogically useful, too.

  2. Seth Milliken Says:

    Looks like there’s a good idea out there, which is to have the server automatically run the keystroke transcript against the challenge on a virgin vim instance upon submission.

    https://github.com/igrigorik/vimgolf/pull/4

  3. Seth Milliken Says:

    There is discussion on #vimgolf about having the server automatically run the keystroke transcript against the challenge on a virgin vim instance upon submission. But this would require everyone using a stock vimgolf .vimrc file.

    The author is also currently working on a mechanism to make solutions to challenges publicly visible.

    I think it’d be cool to have different vimgolf “courses”. There would be a standard course (.vimrc) with some basic, generally agreed upon settings in it. But then you could also point vimgolf at a URL or file hashkey to attempt the challenge with another set of settings. Maybe a particular version of a particular file from a repository. This way if someone considers a particular mapping or function to be “cheating”, they could just choose not to golf on that course, and could ignore scores for that challenge from other golfers using it.

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