Learning Vim Faster

January 07, 2019 · Updated December 20, 2025

VimGolf is my new favorite little toy. As time wasters go, this is probably the best. I pontificated on X about whether or not there was a tool that would let you reverse engineer the results from VimGolf to teach yourself new commands.

I couldn't find one, so in typical engineer fashion, I made one.

Introducing The Magic of Vim. Maybe it will grow into something more. In the meantime, it's a quick lookup tool for Vim keystrokes that someone else blindly tells you to type.

I'll eventually get around to putting it on Github so that other's can contribute.

December 2025 Update: I finally got around to rebuilding this thing from scratch. The tool now actually parses Vim grammar — counts, operators, motions, text objects — and shows you a color-coded breakdown of what each piece does. So when you type something like 3dd or ci" or d2w, it'll break it apart and explain the whole structure instead of just looking up keystrokes one at a time.