November 3, 2025
When keystrokes get artsy
VimGraph
VimGraph turns text into a movement map — fans intrigued, skeptics say WTF
TLDR: Wolfram’s VimGraph turns text navigation in the Vim editor into a visual map of keystrokes. The community is split: some see a clever learning aid or cheat-sheet, others question why it exists, with plugin fans and skeptics sparring over whether visuals help a keyboard-first tool.
Wolfram just dropped VimGraph, a tool that draws a map of how keyboard ninjas hop around text in the classic Vim editor. Think letters as little dots and arrows showing keystroke moves like up, down, next word — and yes, there’s a demo with “Chuck Norris writes his DNA in Vim.” The crowd? Immediately split. Thornton begged for someone to explain why this exists, wondering if it’s for training “coding agents.” Foofoo12 cut through the hype with a blunt “I like Vim and I like graphs. But WTF?” Meanwhile, Jenk saw real potential: a visual cheat-sheet like the popular which-key helper, maybe even printable.
The thread then veered into nerd lore. Samlinnfer teased that if they added Vim’s fast-jump keys (f/F/t/T), it’d be “too easy,” while shouting out the brilliantly named quick-scope plugin. One user admitted they initially thought it was a way to draw actual charts using Vim motions — cue collective giggles. There’s drama over usefulness in a TUI (text-only interface), but the strongest split is between “this is artful and educational” vs. “this is a pretty picture solving a problem nobody had.” The vibe: half museum exhibit, half training wheels, and 100% comment-section popcorn.
Key Points
- •VimGraph constructs a graph where letters are vertices and edges represent Vim navigation shortcuts.
- •Supported movements include h/l, k/j, w/b, e, and ^/$, modeling left/right, up/down, word jumps, and line boundaries.
- •Examples show graph creation for sample text and customization of vertex and edge styles and labels.
- •The function enables computing minimal keystroke paths between letters using FindShortestPath and path highlighting.
- •An experiment uses BarChart and GraphDiameter to study how random newline insertions affect maximum navigation distance.