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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

Quite worthwhile: https://vimvalley.com/

I have no connection whatsoever with the author, but VimValley was a great way to get into http://spacemacs.org/

It's worth mentioning that registration is required to access a few trial tutorials with depth akin to vimtutor, then the full course is $99.

And also worth paying, in my opinion.

I never used any such course, and am still proficient in vim. I would not take, or recommend to take, such a course.

Worth paying $100 to access a tutorial? When the program itself comes with a tutorial built in? Can you give a quick review of what makes this tutorial worth $100 versus any other free or cheaper tutorial?

There's a lot -- I mean, a lot -- that the built-in Vim tutorial doesn't even try to cover. It was enough to make me feel like I was "good enough" with Vim, even though I rarely used it for editing anything more substantial than git commit messages and config files, and if that's what you want out of Vim it's fine! But I bought the ebook version last month of Practical Vim when the publisher was running a "Christmas in July" sale, and it is kind of mind-blowing. (How did I not know about the ":find" command, and why do I need the ctrlp.vim plugin now that I do?)

As to the question about the $100 tutorial, though, that's... well, a lot, but I suppose it depends on whether "Vim Valley" takes an approach that "clicks" for you in ways other things don't. Practical Vim is $23 for a DRM-free ebook, and it has a lot of hands-on exercises; I learn pretty well that way, I've found.

Exactly. I did the built in tutorial and read a bunch of online info on Vim but never really grokked it for years until I decided to really focus on it for a while. There are a few concepts like talking to Vim like a person (which I included in the free portion of the course) that really helped it click for me.

There's a ton of free info on Vim around and it's perfectly viable to learn it on your own that way, it will just take a lot longer. Obviously I'm biased, since I made Vim Valley to be exactly what I think is the fastest and most enjoyable way to learn Vim.

10 bucks? i'd give it a go but it's more than most AAA games.... for a tutorial.

Are you sure you have "no connection whatsoever" with them?

Specifically, I was neither encouraged nor shall I receive any compensation for putting that link here.

If you choose to disbelieve me, that is your choice.

I'm the author of the course, thanks for the kind words! This man of impeccable taste does indeed have no connection to me, learned of this comment because I checked referral logs after I was getting a bunch of signups from Hackernews :)

Oh hey that's super helpful, thanks.

Update: The JS on this site frequently crashes on a fully updated Linux Firefox browser. It's neat so I honestly would have paid, but it just freezes up during some of the later exercises.

Hi, I'm the author of the course. Sorry the site isn't cooperating with your browser. I tested it fairly thoroughly on all browsers when I launched it, but that was 3 years ago. It's entirely possible Firefox may have deprecated some of the more obscure JS I used since then.

If you email me the details of the bug(s) you're running into to hello@vimvalley.com I can try to get them fixed. Otherwise if you're not averse to Chrome everything should work fine with Chrome on Linux.

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