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onivim / oni

Oni: Modern Modal Editing - powered by Neovim
https://www.onivim.io
MIT License
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Feature: Start / Welcome Screen #1226

Closed bryphe closed 6 years ago

bryphe commented 6 years ago

Today, Oni is not very welcoming to the new user, especially a new user who is not familiar with Vim.

As part of our lowering the bar initiative, we should provide a better experience on first launch. Here's a brain dump of some ideas I'm thinking of including on the main page:

Making this keyboard accessible via standard vim commands is important, of course :)

Let me know if you have ideas / feedback!

TalAmuyal commented 6 years ago

While reading your comment, the sentence "Making this keyboard accessible via standard vim commands is important" kept going through my head, so I'd like to like that note twice :P

akinsho commented 6 years ago

😆 A me too is a little unhelpful here but absolutely I think re. keyboard navigation of the screen but I love the idea. As a tiny suggestion re copy of all things, given its the start screen I think the line about oni should include vim in some way so if a user is completely unfamiliar with oni and vim its clear that there's a relationship 🤷‍♂️

athaeryn commented 6 years ago

Could oni include startify preconfigured with the things you listed? Building this with startify gets you mouse + keyboard control for free. :) Users could also edit the config to customize their start screen as they learn more (disable the Learn links, add things like recent sessions, etc.).

bryphe commented 6 years ago

Could oni include startify preconfigured with the things you listed? Building this with startify gets you mouse + keyboard control for free. :)

Good question 😄 It is true that we'd get the mouse+keyboard control for free using a Vim solution. I'd prefer not too, though, primarily because one of the implicit goals I had for the start screen was to highlight Oni's capabilities. In other words, if it is designed correctly, it should be obvious what breaking free of terminal limitations means. It should convey, right from opening the app, that Oni is providing something new and different than terminal vim, but that there is crossover - you don't need to learn a new interaction model.

It's sort of accomplishing two things - letting the user know how to get started, and showing vim users how their knowledge maps into some of these new experiences we're providing & working on. vim-startify helps with the former but not the latter.

I also am hoping it can be a stepping stone / proof-of-concept for some more interesting & complicated experiences - like a gamified vimtutor, debugging layers, etc.

badosu commented 6 years ago

@bryphe @Akin909 Is this fixed by the recent merged PRs on the welcome screen?

https://github.com/onivim/oni/pull/2522 https://github.com/onivim/oni/pull/2527

akinsho commented 6 years ago

@badosu almost although I think #2533 should go in before we close the welcome screen issues since that one completes the functionality or at least this stage of it, that PR is actually complete but shows up with a cross because the cov goes up but the diff isn't fully covered which tbh is hard to do in that pr