[implementations-list] How important is a Vimpulse user manual? How to make one? Copy from Vim docs?

Thu Dec 24 04:54:20 CET 2009

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.

What can we do? Maybe we can copy text straight out of the Vim
documentation for every single keystroke and feature that Viper or
Vimpulse supports, then ship a series of .txt files containing our
newly-cobbled-together documentation? We'd have to give proper
copyright and license acknowledgment of course. And maybe we could use
or write some software to do that copying, so that when Bram adds to
the Vim documentation, we just type "make" and our documentation
instantly will improve?

Or must we ship Texinfo format instead?

Should we get people who write patches to also include documentation
in the patch, and say that if they don't, we won't accept their
patches?

What's doable? What's practical? What's the right thing to do?

Then again, is it really so important for Vimpulse to have a user
manual that tells users how to use its features?  This is only
important for people who went straight from using Emacs to using
Vimpulse, and who have never used Vim.  How common is that?  How can
we find out how common it is?  Can we include a survey in the comments
at the top of the next release of Vimpulse and ask people to fill it
in, join the mailing list, and email it to the list?  (This would also
gain us lots of new list subscribers.)