Cartesian product

The challenge. Make every combination of the numbers 1 to 5.

Stairs Indenting

The challenge. Every line needs a number of spaces equal to the line number. There are lots of interesting solutions, so I'll show several.

Reverse Simple Deletion

It's hard to say if a VimGolf challenge is "hard" or "easy". Every challenge is easy if you waste enough strokes. In Reverse Simple Deletion, just one stroke separates an easy 12 from an unreasonably difficult 11.

Prime Numbers

Prime Numbers is among the hardest challenges in VimGolf. I've spent more time working on this challenge than any other. When I first saw it, I figured I'd have to brush up on my vimscript. As it turns out, you don't really need any at all.

It's a factor (plus a little Prime Numbers)

Given a list of numbers, this challenge has you replace each number with a list of its factors. It sounds complicated, but it can be done very fast with a (somewhat) simple macro.

Line Zipper

Line Zipper is a quality challenge. One of my favorites. This is the sort of zipper we have in mind. If the input was six lines, like a/b/c/A/B/C, the output would be A/a/B/b/C/c.

Unwrap the text of an email message

This is a challenge that's only hard if you don't know the right command. If you do know the right command, it's trivial.

Sort by sum of numbers in a line(?)

While I'm the author of this challenge, it's not exactly my favorite. I made some mistakes in its design. It's short though, and it's got a couple neat tricks.

How to get on VimGolf's leaderboard in 10 challenges

In this post I'll show you how to get your name on the VimGolf leaderboard, and scale it as fast as possible. The leaderboard algorithm has its issues, but for beginning players, it can be a lot of fun. When I started playing, I'd check the leaderboard after every challenge, to see if I'd gained a few spots. It works very well for that purpose, motivating you to do one more challenge, and picking the most popular challenges for the most points. I used to pick challenges by which had the most entries, but I'll show you something a little more sophisticated.

Java Array2List

The challenge is Java Array2List. It's a fun challenge, shorter than it looks, and it's great for showing off certain techniques. If you've never done it, consider doing it now, because this post will have massive spoilers. Your choice. Below the break, I'll demonstrate how to do the challenge in 67 strokes.