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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

IM

24 alternatives to I'm learning VIM and making a game out of it

So, I'm learning VIM and made this yesterday, I pretend to increment it as I learn new stuff. You move with HJKL and that's it for now. Don't let the sublimes consume you. http://worms.io/vimwarrior/

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I'm learning VIM and making a game out of it launched in 2016; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Hey show HN! This course came about as a result of wanting a more targeted way of practicing using new vim commands I wanted to pick up, rather than just trying to use them in my regular code editing sessions. When I would try to use new commands during code editing, my productivity took a hit because I was trying to do two different things at once: thinking about code vs practicing my muscle memory. So, I made a separate environment for practicing, one that had an interactive editor, progress tracking, and achievement goals to let me see which areas I should work on, like speed and…

    2022 · vimified.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Learn vim fast by building muscle memory. 2000+ engineers learned vim with our hands on training. Train your fingers, master vim commands!

    2021 · vim.so · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Learning VIM while playing a game

    2015 · vim-adventures.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    vim.so▲444

    Learn vim fast with interactive exercises in the browser

    2021 · learnvim.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey HN! After my own experiences with learning Vim, I wanted to skip the frustrating process of configuring a new tool before even learning how to use it. In an attempt to solve this problem, I started working on Vim Ninja, a web app that would allow developers to learn Vim through interactive lessons in the browser. It’s been a couple of months, and I’m proud to say that I’ve finally released https://VimNinja.com! Check out a demo of the app here: https://youtu.be/reukQHKqMZE. On the technical side of things, I used SvelteKit to build the entire app and Tailwind,…

    2023 · vimninja.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    I have been a devoted vim user for almost 3 decades and frankly it has served me well! Yes I do get tempted to try out the next best thing (though Zed has some serious names so am even more tempted). But frankly something about staying in the terminal that I am just too used to and dont want to change. Though I never bothered updating the vimrc often (did 4 "major" updates in those years) I found myself wanting to update my vimrc for vimspector. This time instead of again trying to understand vimscript and reading the various docs, I let claude code on it and dang it has been a fun journey…

    Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Just launched my app, VimGolf.ai! As users complete the levels on the map, I introduce progressively more complicated concepts — it’s aimed at people who have never used Vim. Any feedback would be much appreciated!

    Jul 2026 · vimgolf.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8VA

    https://github.com/iogf/vy

    2017 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.

    2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11IB

    I was somewhat hesitant about sharing this personal projects, especially since I just saw that cool looking Werk[1] tool posted, but I figured that my ADHD-fueled creation might still have it's own place to be. I just finished rewriting the code for a personal tool I use to automate terminal tasks while minimizing the amount of Python/Bash code I have to write. As with all other tools I create for my own use, the guiding principle is simplicity and approachability, as if the tool creates more issues or friction than it solves, I'll get discouraged from using it again. [1]:…

    Jun 2026 · 0xff.nu · its alternatives →

  12. 12IM

    So hard to keep up with tooling and MLOps - I put it all in one place and got some tips from an experienced friend on what to use.

    2025 · readyforagents.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13MP

    My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.

    2022 · petersaxton.uk · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I know mentioning Michael Seibel is almost cheating, but this week he demonstrated the "leaky pipes" concept to me. Not that I know the guy, but in one of his videos he says something on the lines of "If you are unsure if you app is ready to be launched, just launch it. It's like a house with leaky pipes, just open the main, grab your tools, and start fixing wherever water is leaking". So we did it, we launched drummy earlier this week on /r/InternetIsBeautiful and we got very close to 10k users in just one day! Survived the hug of death, learned a ton, and made changes all around.…

    2022 · drummy.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hello! I love anki and have been using it for years to learn mandarin, but I'm lazy and always struggled to get over the "motivation hump" to sit down and create a deck. Recently I've been consuming a lot of AI content from youtube, and spent 3 days creating a deck for Andrej Karpathy's "Deep Dive into LLMs" video. This is impractical - so I built a little youtube to anki converter @ asimpleai.com It's rough around the edges... but I would like it to eventually become something useful to community. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! peace

    2025 · asimpleai.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17IB

    A minimal coding blog

    2020 · elliotbonneville.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hey HN. I've become enamored with the Acme editor. It's fascinating because it turns the Vim paradigm on its head: instead of maximizing your use of the keyboard, maximize your use of the mouse. I think this helps optimize for information management, as opposed to text manipulation. I realized a lot of the CLIs I use have the same structure, and with a small program I could convert them into GUIs inside Acme and make them much easier to use. Let me know what you think.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19VI

    This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.

    2022 · docs.vaxiin.io · its alternatives →

  20. 20WM

    Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…

    2014 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon

    2024 · kopage.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    :notebook_with_decorative_cover: The interactive scratchpad for hackers. - metakirby5/codi.vim

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24PA

    Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…

    2024 · playcodeai.com · its alternatives →

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