From: [email protected] Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:30:28 -0500
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.
Yes. I did some work just now on simplifying INSTALL.
Great!
(By the way, I bet bugs also cause such losses. Thanks for the bug-fixing work you've done.)
You're welcome. :)
I don't remember for sure anymore, but I think what hooked me onto Viper is this: I had already been using Emacs, and realized that its Ctrl- and Ctrl-Shift-key combinations were unpleasant to type. So I switched to using Viper inside of Emacs.
This is often referred to as the "Emacs pinky" problem, but I don't think it's Emacs specific, having done careful comparisons with other mature editors like TextMate, jEdit and SlickEdit. Guess what I found? They all suffer from the same Ctrl-Shift-Alt clutter. The simple fact is that if the editor is non-modal, keyboard-oriented and rich in features, overloading of the modified keys is just inevitable. It's not a matter of "bloat", either; yes, Emacs bundles Tetris, but it doesn't make a key binding for it. (For that matter, tetris.el is autoloaded, so the "bloat" charge doesn't really apply.) The paradoxical truth is that it is feature-heavy Emacs, often touted as the arch-enemy of modal editor Vim in an epic "editor war", which would benefit the most from a modal interface.
You're right. The Vim reference manual is very newbie-unfriendly. ... But Štěpán made a very good point elsewhere in this thread. We could copy from the user manual instead. ... This manual is much friendlier.
Very much so, but also a longer read, necessarily. I think all documentation, no matter who it's targeted at, is subject to the following restriction: "friendly, concise, detailed -- pick two". That is, it may be concise and detailed, but not friendly, like Vim's Reference Manual; friendly and detailed, but not concise, like the Introduction to Emacs Lisp (and the Lisp Reference Manual); or friendly and concise, but not detailed, like a Quick Starter's Guide. If exceptions exist, they are products of exceptional skill and effort. I'm a natural long-winded writer, myself. So maybe our documentation will need to be two-fold: a quick starter's guide, with (require 'vimpulse) and some Emacs pointers, and a more complete reference manual, showing how to tweak variables with `setq'. The former would be friendly and concise, the latter friendly and detailed. I don't think there's a place for concise and detailed, except maybe in source code comments.
There is something called the guided tour of Emacs, by Phil Sung. ... http://web.psung.name/emacs/ ... It seems to me that it would be excellent if all Vimpulse users were encouraged to look at the tour, no? If so, what's the best way to encourage this?
It's a nice overview, and HTML-based to boot, which I consider a huge plus. Every Vimpulse user is going to need a little Emacs knowledge at some point, so a careful selection of good introductions is definitely valuable. At the same time, I think stand-alone Viper requires too much knowledge too early: for instance, there's no h/j/k/l navigation in the help buffers, as Viper disables itself in a number of cases to avoid overriding special keymaps. I suggest Vimpulse slightly augment these keymaps with basic vi navigation (but without overwriting anything) to avoid infinite recursion: "vi keys don't work in Help, use Emacs keys instead. To learn Emacs keys, use the Help system."
Load it, tweak it, use it; the whole thing should be as transparent and straightforward as possible.
This is a very good idea. I'm assigning you three feature requests based on this idea. :)
I'll look at them in time, after I've done away with some more of the older tickets. Vegard _________________________________________________________________ Windows 7: Se direkte-TV fra den bærbare PCen. Finn ut mer. http://windows.microsoft.com/windows-7