If you find yourself editing text at the Linux command prompt, you've probably either used nano, which is simplest, or the more powerful but difficult-to-master Vim. In Vim, for example, even moving the cursor up, down, left, and right is less than straightforward. How about an ice cream-themed game to teach you all the "Vim motions" (keyboard shortcuts) you need to become a master?

London-based developer and designer Marcus Michaels has created Vim Scoops, a simple HTML/CSS/JavaScript game that lives in a web browser to help users learn them. As an ice cream truck trying to make the most efficient deliveries to customers as possible, players use Vim motions to dart around the screen and try to meet par on each level. 

The very first one, for example, has three people on the map, one marked with a C (the target customer) and two marked with an X (people who hate ice cream and don’t care if you drive by). Using the four basic one-character movement keys in Vim (h for left, j for down, k for up, and l for right) you have to try to get to the customer in five moves. Easy enough - just ljljl your way to the customer and that’s that. 

Other initial levels test your ability to jump around to new words (w), line starts (0), and, from there, things get more complicated - and rely on you remembering the motions you already showed you knew in order to meet par on the various puzzles. 

Michaels, who told us he uses Vim daily alongside other editors like Neovim and the AI-infused Zed editor, still says he uses Vim motions whenever they’re available. 

“Ultimately it’s just a way to stay on the keyboard without needing a mouse, but if you dig deep it’s really powerful, especially for repetitive tasks,” Michaels told us in an email. That said, he understands that others might find them confusing, especially if they’re using non-standard, Vim-like editors that have additional tools - or if they’re doing a deep dive into obscure Vim commands. 

"The reason why I built [Vim Scoops] was because I genuinely love making things and sharing knowledge, but also I wanted a game to play so I could keep my memory fresh,” Michaels told us. “My commute has a bunch of signal dead spots, and I built this to be a progressive web app, so on my commute I can keep playing even if I’m offline.”

Hacker News readers commented that it appeared Michaels used AI to build Vim Scoops, citing a few errors. Michaels admitted that AI aided the game’s development, but he wants to be clear that AI didn’t build the game in its entirety. 

“I’ve been programming since long before modern AI tools existed, but I find they can type faster than I can. For small, well-defined tasks they speed me up considerably,” Michaels said, but he maintains, much like the rest of the world beginning to sour on total automation, that AI is best used as a tool - not a replacement for real work. 

“Used to enhance a developer rather than replace one, it’s incredibly valuable,” Michaels told us. “The danger is when people hand over too much control without understanding what’s being generated.”

“Everything I ship with AI assistance is something I understand fully and could write myself,” the Vim Scoops dev explained. “AI just helps me get there faster.”

If you don’t want to use AI to help you code and would rather move around a document yourself, Vim Scoops might just help you learn to maintain a bit of independence. It’s free, and teaches advanced techniques as deep as recording actions for playback in future projects. ®