Crazy to see this thing on the front page of hacker news.
First off - I JUST started putting the site together and didn't expect any attention yet. So apologies for the bugs and mismatched content. Pull requests welcome at github.com/mrmrs/vimgifs :)
I created vimgifs because I have found gifs to be an effective way to help people learn vim commands. And I really like helping people become more efficient at building out their ideas.
The long term vision is to have a comprehensive set of examples that can be searched in a myriad of ways i.e related commands, all motion commands,all commands available in insert mode, .etc. If it's in :help I want a gif of it!
I don't have an opinion on whether or not vim is 'intuitive' but I will say it is much easier to learn than people make it out to be. I'd say it is infinitely less complex than whatever language you are trying to write in.
It took me less than a week to become more proficient in vim than in textmate - and I knew most of the command and shortcuts in textmate.
To people who say they don't have time to learn vim, a counter:
If you are pressed for time so much that you are debating whether or not you have time to learn something... it sounds like vim is definitely for you!
Vim isn't just about key strokes, commands, shortcuts, and the like. The more I learn about vim's capabilities the more I fundamentally think differently about editing and manipulating text. It has branching history, native ability to step through compile errors for ANY language, and navigation methods that truly changed how I think about exploring/navigating a code system. It's also ubiquitous which is pretty rad. I can't remember the last time I touched a computer that didn't have my favorite editor already installed.
I would encourage people not to denounce something they have never possessed. If you are not proficient in vim - it is difficult to denounce how intuitive it is. It's tough to denounce its ways and how much time they might save you.
I have become quite proficient in atom, sublime, textmate, and a few other editors. Even with 'vim mode' enabled these editors do not come close to the power that lies within vim.
But rest assured you can write amazing software with any text editor. I've met a lot of people who are excellent at writing code that never use vim and don't like it much.
In short - I hope this project makes it more fun and less intimidating to learn vim. I was lucky to have some amazing teachers when I got going and would love to pay their efforts forward a little bit.
Well I started designing the site a few hours ago so - it would make sense it has bugs and is out of sorts at the moment. Better information architecture is coming down the pipe for sure.
I would argue that .NET did allow for developers to be very productive at shipping the worst UI code I have ever seen. Productivity != shipping horrible code faster than ever. In my opinion.
From my understanding - it is proprietary at the moment but Apple has publicly pushed for other vendors to do something similar and for it to be standardized. There is a discussion on w3c to make this a standard: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Jul/0169....
I get that this is proprietary - but I do like the idea of font styles being driven by global user settings at the browser or system level. Would love to see more of this in the future.
I put this together mostly so that I could build some simple iOS prototypes with html and css - not something I'd use for the average web app project.
