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Comment by spacemanaki | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to respectfully offer another opinion: I would NOT love if it some vim commands were thrown in. By all means, devote a single episode to tools, since the set up demonstrated might be complex to recreate, and it would likely be something a lot of people want to use too. But I don't think tips specific to a single editor have any place in screencasts that are about one programming language in general.

An unobtrusive way to introduce editor tips that just came to mind would be to add subtitles with selected key-combos that might be nontrivial or not obvious. More than that would be a distraction, I think. Also, I don't know if YouTube supports multiple subtitle tracks... so that might be a big fu to deaf or hearing impaired programmers who want to follow along.

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I'm going to have to side with spacemanaki here.

My biggest focus in using vim was to get it out of the way so that I could focus on the Haskell. I wanted the environment (editor, compiler, window manager, test runner, etc) to be as transparent as possible. This is not, in point of fact, a series of vim tutorial videos.

I will make a video that explains my dev environment as a supplement, however.

I'd be happy to answer any vim questions in the comments (github issues, which I will hopefully figure out how to embed in the site eventually), and I do like the idea of adding call out boxes (no need to use subtitles, they can go on the video itself) to highlight interesting vim trickery.

Great suggestion, that's on par with what I had in mind. I was not implying OP should have a 3-minute segment on vim commands. Maybe just casually say "and I'm going to use :tab which allows me to select multiple lines and line up the equal signs" or something similar.

> Maybe just casually say "and I'm going to use :tab which allows me to select multiple lines and line up the equal signs" or something similar.

No, I wouldn't want them to casually say anything... that's why the subtitles would be an unobtrusive compromise, since you can just turn them off. I think this would be even more important if the screencast was targeted at new users of the language or framework or whatever, since the viewer might be confused and wonder if ":tab" was something to do with the syntax of the language.

I want subtitles to perform their primary accessibility function. How about YouTube annotations?

I had forgotten about annotations, those might be ideally suited for editor and env tips. Honestly, I use Emacs, so I'm not that interested in the vim tips, I just didn't want these to turn into a series of Haskell-with-Vim casts. :) even thought your env does looks pretty slick.

Really nice video, looking forward to more!

Yep exactly. I want to keep the videos per se as env-agnostic as possible to not get in the way of the Haskell.

Seconded. Devote a short episode to tools, but don't mix the tools and programming too much.

Yes I wouldn't like it either because I don't use vim.

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