notes to self

Ice cream flavoured Vim⁠

I built a game called Vim Scoops. It runs in the browser, works offline (PWA), and I mostly play it on my commute. It's also based in the same ice cream universe that these notes live in.

The idea is that you use Vim motions to drive an ice cream van around to your customers (and later levels you reorganise stock, fix messed up orders, and other fun stuff). Each level drops you on a grid with customers marked C (and sometimes people who don't want any ice cream marked X), with the goal being to use as few keystrokes as possible to stay at, or under, par. For example, level one is five moves using a combination of hjkl to drive your van to the customer.

The early levels start with the basics. w to jump forward a word instead of nudging one square with l. 0 to snap you to the start of the line. Then as you progress, the levels start combining them, so a route that took twelve presses of l can now be done in three keystrokes.

Motions are great, but to really unleash the power Vim Scoops also teaches about macros. Macros allow you to record a sequence of moves once, then replay it, so a delivery that would've' been forty keystrokes is now a repetition of what you've already done.

I love it. It's fun (and surprisingly addictive)... so I put it on Hacker News, and it turns out other people like it too. It was upvoted to the front page, and then had a full article written about it in The Register. Mental.

Go play it. You don't need to use the actual Vim editor to benefit from the motions. Most mainstream IDEs (like Zed or VS Code) have a vim mode that you can enable. If you like it, tell your friends, and also tell me too :)