Outofthebot

Hi HN! I’m Rahul, an engineer at Fig, and I led the development of Dotfiles.

Our goal was to build a structured editor[0] for shell dotfiles - with a keyboard-driven editing experience that is as fast as a traditional text editor, while offering more guidance.

We built this because in the process of onboarding users to autocomplete[1], we saw first-hand how much difficulty many developers have managing their shell configuration.

Once you get the hang of it, editing configuration files, like your .zshrc or .bashrc, unlocks a lot of powerful customization. However, there is a substantial learning curve.

When you manage your dotfiles using Fig, your development environment follows you across devices, operating systems and even between different shells. Any changes you make sync automatically. And, if you want, you can easily share your shell configuration - aliases, environment variables, scripts & more - across your entire team.

I’d love to hear what you think about this new approach to dotfiles! This is our first release, so there is definitely room to improve.

PS. Dotfiles is free for individual use and for open-source projects!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor [1] https://github.com/withfig/autocomplete

You can actually still make any of the previous technical animations using the current software. It's just that the outward pages are geared to demo the customer tutorial use case

Bitcoin demo - https://textframe.app/examples/bitcoin

CockroachDB demo - https://textframe.app/rahul/cockroachdb_serverless_demo

Haha I totally missed that. I’m so used to onboarding people via email/video calls.

One of my demo tutorials shows exactly how to embed!

https://textframe.app/embed_tutorial

what version of iOS/device are you on? My guess is I am using a browser API that is not supported by your version of Safari.

yes, the tutorials can be embedded! If you email me at rahul@textframe.app I can walk you through how to do it.

I have to agree with you, my outward facing pages look a bit unprofessional right now. I assume by the marketing page, you mean 'pricing' page?

I'm glad you pointed out the Loom use case. My whole angle was that I thought products are leaning too much into video, when text has some great advantages: skimming, scrolling, copy pasting, etc.

I see what you mean now. That's a really valuable insight. Will definitely think about this for my next iteration.

Thank you for the feedback!

When you say marketing tool, what sort of content do you have in mind?

Also, I do provide the ability to embed in your landing pages, the instructions are at the bottom of my landing page.

Do you have an example of one of these you have in mind? I'm not very familiar with user stories.

That's awesome to hear. Definitely get in touch with me over email, I'd love to discuss more with you.

Hi HN,

My name is Rahul Sarathy and I posted TextFrame a few months ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29234636) as a tool to create animated technical papers. After gathering feedback from the community, I found that the best use case for my tool was for creating tutorials.

I am proud to share my next iteration as a tool to create animated product tutorials. Hopefully you can find use in it to create more engaging tutorials for onboarding and helping out your users.

You can check out some examples I’ve created using the software: at https://textframe.app/examples

Please let me know what you think! You can also email me at rahul@textframe.app if you have any questions or just want to say hello

I wonder if Beeper (https://www.beeper.com) uses something like this to get you a macOS iMessage instance in the cloud. Was always curious how they could tout that seemingly impossible feature, but looks like this is a way to do it.

This makes this post make a lot more sense when you put it in that context.

Congrats to them on the round.

Ddin't think coin tracker was a big deal, but when I think about them as the Intuit for crypto, it makes a lot more sense.

Thank you!

It's always good to see more people building interactive learning content. Feel free to email me at rahul@textframe.app if you want to chat.

Yes, you're definitely right. I was trying some hacks with css scroll-snap, but wasn't able to get anything functional.

If anyone has any input on how I could add more resistance to the scrolling, I would greatly appreciate it!

That's definitely something I've been thinking about. I'm currently working on a feature to export to static HTML.

Hi rkuska, that's an interesting use case I'd really like to explore.

Do you mind emailing me at rahul@textframe.app?

Would love to see if I could help you and your co-worker's workflow at all.

Thank you!

Started with the editor view itself, and then built the final output page afterwards.

Thank you!

And yes, the editor view is not fully intuitive unfortunately. You can delete blocks similar to how you delete blocks in notion - dragging a rectangle over them.

If you are having trouble creating content for an idea you have, feel free to email me at rahul@textframe.app. I can help you figure out any other issues you have.

Thanks for sharing!

This looks super cool. Will definitely look towards some of the examples here as features I can implement.

Thanks for the correction. Edited the post.

Hi HN,

My name is Rahul Sarathy and I created TextFrame, a no-code platform to create animated written content. I've linked an example here where I use TextFrame to animate the Bitcoin white paper.

You can check out more examples are https://textframe.app/examples

If you're interested, feel free to sign up and play around with the software.

Hi HN, my name is Rahul Sarathy and I built Homer (https://usehomer.app), a tool to allow creators to build more interactive digital textbooks.

Right now the software supports image based scrollytelling with a roadmap to add interactive components such as annotations, animations, backlinks, and more.

You can check out a demo of an interactive history book here: https://usehomer.app/demo Here's another short example of how a personal finance related book could look like: https://usehomer.app/rahul/8

If you're interested in checking out the UI used to build the demo above, feel free to sign up at https://usehomer.app/signup and create a book.

Hi, I made something very similar a few months back https://getpulp.io

I'm no longer working on it (the service is shut down), and have since transitioned to a new project, but I would be happy to chat. Do you have an email I can reach out to? If not comfortable sharing, feel free to reach out to me on twitter.com/outofthebot

How is following your dreams associated with the student debt crisis?

I would argue that most people in college are not following their dreams, but rather following a defined path.

A billion in revenue, not profit, just to be clear. Still nothing to scoff at.

Looks absolutely amazing. Eagerly awaiting wallet monitoring for more currencies

Agreed. I get that it's easier to build a singular cross platform app using a JS framework, but the decrease in quality from a well done native app really shows. I'm looking at you Spotify, todoist, Slack and others

Superfluous RAM use hurts battery life a lot. Using Safari over Chrome easily saves 2+ hours for me.