Seconds Count, Not Keystrokes

It’s not how short it is that matters, it’s how quick you are.

at the keys, not under the sheets
— Vimmers

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Golf: A good edit ruined.

The Problems:

• Vim Golf optimises on the wrong thing: keystrokes
  
• Vim Golf demands a bare-metal Vim
  

Least Number of Keystrokes

Banging out thirty characters in a few seconds to solve a problem is immeasurably better than spending several minutes contemplating the fewest keystrokes possible to achieve the same result. The point here is, time is a better metric to test yourself against. Can you solve this problem any faster than the last time you tried? Perhaps since then, you’ve crafted a new map or text-object or macro to simplify the task. Isn’t that exactly what Vimmers should be doing? It is Bram’s key point in Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing suggestions, after all.

Bare-Metal Vim

EVERYONE uses a more able Vim than what Vim Golf insists upon. Everyone has better features enabled, Useful Plugins, and custom commands, maps and abbreviations to lighten their editing load. I get that competition requires a level playing field, but that in turn is hindering the competitors. Vimmers walk away from their morning on the golf course with less than they should. They should be able to utilise everything they practised.

Playa:	Aw… but how can I show my l33t skilz? :-(
Vimmer:	Play Vim Golf

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Is There No Place for Vim Golf?

Of course there is. It has its uses. If you like playing, keep at it. I’ve seen positive effects in some Vimmers. I implied earlier that "spending minutes contemplating a fewer keystroke alternative" was inefficient and that you’d be better served by sticking to a more verbose alternative that you know well. To be clear, what I mean here is that if what you craft on the golf course is arcane, complex and immemorable (albeit awesomely short), you will end up not using it in your daily editing. Sure, you could try to make it a habit, but then you run into problem #2 — don’t remember a cryptic collage of keystrokes when Vim can do it for you, in a map, say.

Learning shorter ways to get stuff done in Vim is fun and enlightening. I know. I’ve spent many hours on this journey too. But it is a journey; the benefit comes from the process, not the product. Learning that there is a keystroke that lets you type Normal Mode commands in Insert Mode is eye-opening and, at first, spawns a desire to play with this shiny new toy. The Learned Vimmer soon realises though that this shiny new bauble is better left in the box and only taken out when maps are being made.

• The process: discovery, assessment & assimilation.
  
• The product: a new command that you really shouldn’t use when live-typing.

You want to learn every feature the editor offers and use the most efficient command all the time.
You will waste a lot of time learning things you will never use.

Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing - How not to edit effectively
— Bram Moolenaar

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Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Charles Birch
— Taekwondo Master

I learnt that quote first-hand from the inimitable Mr Birch. I internalised it at the time, reflect on it frequently, and counsel my own students likewise.

The point of the quote is: If you practice the wrong thing, then you’ll learn well to do it wrong. An additional note here is that repairing a bad habit costs more than learning good habits to begin with. The apocryphal metric tossed about on the training floor was: it takes 50 repetitions to learn a new move, and 200 to unlearn a bad one. Regardless of the accuracy of those particular numbers, the phenomenon it describes is nonetheless very real.

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A Better Way

Use Your Vim, Luke

Vim Golf requires that you use a crippled Vim. No. Use your Vim. You’ve grown your ~/.vimrc with its suite of maps, abbreviations, commands and functions designed around your Vimming habits, and you’ve installed plugins that further enhance your editing prowess. Use them! Practice them. Cultivate them: throw away bad ones; repair broken ones; develop new ones.

Compete Against Younger You

Instead of comparing your keystroke length to that of others, you’re better off competing against your own Personal Best times for the editing task at hand.

Method

1. Grab an editing task. These can come from your own experience or you can just use those on Vim Golf.
   
2. Reflect on your prior attempt of this problem (you are repeating your practice exercises, right?!)
   
3. Grab your stopwatch; time your execution; record the results.
   
4. Reflect again. How did you go? Did you improve your Personal Best time? If not, why not? What are the time-sinks? What can you improve? Would a map help? Or a macro? A plugin?
   

Macros, Such Fleeting Pleasures Have you ever crafted an awesome macro to refactor code, or munge data into structures, or perform a tedious operation that frequently arises in this particular file, task or programming language, only to lose all that effort when you close Vim? Sure, with :help 'viminfo you can have Vim persist your registers (in which your macros are stored), but their fragile nature means that you or any one of your plugins can overwrite them without warning. VimLocalMacros was written to solve this problem. It stores the contents of registers inside comments within the current file so that when you come back to the file, you can restore the registers and have your macros at the ready without having to remember and recreate them over and again.

Those four steps sound easy enough, right? It couldn’t get any easier! Er, well, this is Vim. Of course it could be easier! :-) Get to the VimGym and let it handle all that finicky stuff, like:

• keeping an extendible store of practice exercises
  
• timing your attempts and storing the results
  
• analysing your game, suggesting improvements and forcing extra practice in problem areas
  

VimKata was one of the very first Vim plugins I ever worked on, and so it was therefore doomed to failure from the outset. I didn’t have the skills necessary to tackle such a beast. I didn’t know how to build it; I didn’t know what to focus on; I didn’t know what I didn’t know. VimGym is less than VimKata in some ways and therefore so very much more.

So, in summary, my thoughts on Vim Golf and Deliberate Practice for Vim are:

• Vim Golf hobbles Vimmers by limiting them to an unrealistically featureless Vim
  
• Vim Golf measures the wrong thing: time taken to complete the task is more important than the number of keystrokes
  
• Improvement in a skill comes from repeatedly attempting tasks that are at the edge of your abilities and getting feedback on performance. Ideally this would come from an expert, but VimGym uses the task completion time as an acceptable fallback.
  
• Vimmers should be adopting a Seven Habits to Effective Text Editing approach to Vimming whereby they identify inefficiencies, craft improvements, and exercise them to make them habitual.
  

Whether you choose to go it alone, stick with just VimGolf, or try VimGym too, I wish you well on your journey.