Vimgifs is absolutely amazing. Though I can make my way around vim, I've learned _so_ much from watching these. I love how they combine several different commands (sometimes which I already knew) to show new combinations that are just even better. Thank you @mrmrs_ 🙏🏻
@mscccc I feel like there were a few influences that inspired me to start putting it together. I spend a lot of time thinking about software. Writing software. Changing software. And software is just a bunch of text. So I think a lot about text editing a lot.
Since I've started learning vim I've always really enjoyed sitting with other vim users and watching how they solve problems or what their workflow is like. I get very excited learning about and discussing all things text-editing. At some point along the way a few people asked for help on how to learn vim - so I started to get experience teaching people vim and observing what worked and what didn't work. When working remotely I'd often whip together short screencasts to demo to people how I'd solve a particular problem. Then I started to do more public screencasts around using vim and designing in the browser. The response to the screencasts I was putting out left an impression on me of how powerful the visual feedback loop was for people trying to learn. I could write a blog post about something - but it wouldn't seem to help some types of info stick as much as a 1-5 minute screencast.
Early on in my days of learning vim I read the Steve Losh book 'Learn vimscript the hard way.' There is a lot of really awesome info in that book (http://learnvimscriptthehardway....). At the end of each page is a list of help pages to read. This was my first foray into reading :help and I have to say the docs kind of blew my mind. I had been using vim for about 2 years and felt pretty fluent. But after reading through everything in :help, I started to feel like I wasted a lot of time trying to learn through google. The number 2 best ways to learn vim in my opinion are reading through :help and talking to other vim users if you can find them. The help docs are really well written and significantly changed my thinking around the process of writing and editing software. I can't recommend them enough.
It is always amusing to me when I meet people who have been using vim for several years and don't know about ctrl-o and ctrl-i, both of which are in the first few sections of :help. I think for a lot of individual commands like that, super useful, yet people don't know about them. A screencast can be a bit of overkill for small things though. Not to mention screencasts have a very high barrier to entry. It's a big time commitment to focus on watching something for more than 10 seconds. A gif is advantageous as it is short and just loops which I think encourages repeat viewings more than manually pressing play on a 5 second video. This project is really me wanting to visually document everything in vim :help. I figure, if people won't read it, maybe they'll watch it one gif at a time.
The twitter feed I think is a nice way to consume a few tips a day. I'm hoping the website can help people connect the dots more on how composable the commands are and discover the various ways a single command can be used. I'm still working on sorting out the information architecture for all of the content. But I'm excited about the possibilities.
I actually started to record these a few years ago - but shortly after I got going, the keystroke visualizer I was using stopped working. I recently needed to record a screencast and so found a new keystroke visualizer that worked for me, so after discovering no one had taken vimgifs.com or @vimgifs on twitter - I figured I should get going on documenting all those vim commands. I've seen @csswizardry post for the past several years I think, various vim and unix tips in gif format. We chatted about collaborating a bit - and it's been a lot of fun getting to watch the commands he publishes. Now that he and I are in the same part of the world, we might have to have a weekend vimgifathon soon.
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