From: [email protected] Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:54:20 -0500
Vimpulse needs better documentation -- a better user manual, saying how to use all of its features. Look at the Viper info manual and see how great it is. Look at our documentation -- it's very incomplete.
My view is that while Viper's manual is wonderfully comprehensive and wonderful in its comprehensiveness, it is not a good role model for Vimpulse. Vimpulse should be as no-nonsense as emacsly possible -- you load it up and start typing -- and along those lines, its documentation should be small, concise and straight to the point. This is just my view, of course, but I've googled a dozen accounts of how a Vim user would try the Emacs/Viper route, stumble onto some annoying inconsistency, and eventually give up on Emacs altogether. I therefore see as one of Vimpulse's main challenges to hold on to a new user for sufficiently long that they get "hooked" and maybe start exploring what amazingly cool things you can do when the underlying substrate consists of Emacs Lisp. Vim is a programmer's editor, in the true sense of that term. This is most apparent when looking up the documentation. The help files of a "popular" Windows editor like Notepad++ is full of friendly screenshots and easy-to-follow explanations of how you can perform a search and replace on your text in just six simple steps, but makes no mention at all of remapping the internals or tweaking cryptic variables. Vim's documentation has no pictures, but its level of detail is staggering, as seen when issuing ":help <BS>": [count] characters to the left. |exclusive| motion. Note: If you prefer <BS> to delete a character, use the mapping: :map CTRL-V<BS> X (to enter "CTRL-V<BS>" type the CTRL-V key, followed by the <BS> key) See |:fixdel| if the <BS> key does not do what you want. This is as no-nonsense as you can get. It is also overwhelmingly newbie-unfriendly. If you were to make a Vimpulse's User's Manual out of it, you wouldn't tell a Vim user anything they didn't know, nor a newbie anything they'd want to hear. What is it a Vim user doesn't know, then? Emacs, and Emacs Lisp. How to (setq ...) variables rather than :set them, how to tweak whatever needs tweaking, how to combine the power of Vim with the power of Emacs. All of this should be shown by example. When you've never used Lisp before, it is okay to copy and modify an expression without understanding completely how it works. But it mustn't be too overwhelming. At least not at first sight. Load it, tweak it, use it; the whole thing should be as transparent and straightforward as possible. To that end, maybe Vimpulse should load and configure Viper automatically, so that a single (require 'vimpulse) is sufficient to get started. I'm reminded of how Unix gained massive popularity not because it was consistent and complete, but because it was portable and practical. Vimpulse should at least be practical. Its documentation should be clear, example-loaded and straight to the point, and preferably some measures shorter than this e-mail, if possible. My two cents. :) _________________________________________________________________ Få nye Windows Live™ Messenger. http://download.live.com/messenger