avalonv
commented
2 years ago Currently the process for finding the documentation for how to use telescope or nvim-tree, two essential parts of LunarVim's UI, goes a bit like this: Getting Started -> Installation -> Quickstart -> Under "Next Steps", there's a page pointing to plugins, which explains how to configure them -> From here a user could reach Core Plugins List, which links to the documentation.
Imo, this is a rather unintuitive way of learning how to use a program, as:
- It's too many steps, which makes it more likely users will look for help elsewhere (the issues page), when all the relevant documentation is technically on the website already.
- You have to deduce the core UI's function based on their descriptions in a rather long list, instead of being told what does what from the beginning.
- You're taught how to configure components in the program before being shown what they do. Furthermore, many of these components have unintuitive names (telescope), so seeing examples in the configuration doesn't alleviate 2.
IMO, for more advanced things like linters and git integration and such, where the user is likely to open a configuration file to configure project specific options anyway, point 2 is not a problem, there are better ways to convey information, but for their scope it's perfectly fine. However for the built-in aspects of the interface, for what comes bundled with the IDE itself and is necessary to navigate it, it's confusing to have to read through a sub-page to the "plugins" page to understand how, for example, the "open a file" dialogue works, when you aren't familiar with what "telescope" is, and thus can't know whether "teslecope" is a plugin or not.
Summarizing what these key UI components are (and where to find their documentation), in a "Interface & Navigation", or "Using LunarVim", subsection of quickstart, perhaps as a standalone page, would significantly alleviate most of those problems, and make it more accessible for people that aren't already familiar with vim as an IDE.
rebuilt
Currently, navigating certain key components of LunarVim's interface require familiarity with external plugins. This by itself is not a problem, the problem is that there isn't an easy way for a new user to find out what some of those plugins are, and thus read their documentation, leading to an artificially steep learning curve early on.
This thread summarizes this issue: a new user has no clue how to use the default file explorer bundled with LunarVim because they're unfamiliar with the plugin it is based on. There's nothing to indicate the explorer on the screen is
nvim-tree, and although there's a simple keybinding to list other keybindings, it's not shown anywhere.As @rebuilt mentioned in the thread, it's unreasonable to expect this project's website to host the documentation for each and every core plugin, as these plugins are updated all the time. I think a good compromise for an IDE however, would be to describe the default UI components used for navigation and link to their respective documentation pages directly on the quickstart page.