Raúl, Thank you for such a comprehensive response. :-)
> I have just one suggestion, but it is tightly coupled with my way of > thinking about this kind of books ;) I think that the perfect place for > tips and tricks is a wiki and not a book for one main reasons: the wiki > allows readers to improve the tip/trick and update it when needed. It is > more "alive" than a book, even if the book is online. For such a mutable > thing as a tip'n'trick collection for a piece of software, keeping the > book up to date is difficult, and in a wiki the effort is somewhat > shared. The Tips wiki is wonderful, but I think my approach has merit. The wiki is a vast collection of often esoteric, terse tips. This is useful for intermediate/expert users who already have a decent idea of what they're looking for, but for new users it only furthers the stereotype that Vim is obscure and difficult to use. In Vim Recipes I have a far narrower focus, so can expand on solutions to common problems, presenting them in an optimal fashion. Indeed, by maintaining a common voice the book can suggest the best solution for a given problem, rather than the grab-bag approach of the wiki. That said, I could certainly do a far better job of pointing to relevant pages on the Tips wiki from the recipes. For example, the majority of "cheatsheets" and tip collections for Vim suggest :wq as the way to save a file and quit. It was pointed out to me, that :x actually makes more sense for most people. Unfortunately, it's in this culture that questionable best practices are disseminated. The goal is to publish large quantities of tips copied from others rather than aiming for a sensible moderated collection that is generally useful. Conversely, the official Vim documentation is refreshingly thorough, as is befitting a reference work, but that depth makes it unsuitable for quick study. Most users don't need to know every way of solving every task, what the Vi equivalent is, and how RISC OS implements a given function. ;-) My aim is to cherry pick from the two poles. In my experience, books released in wiki form are rarely significantly expanded from their original remit, and the editor's primary role becomes reverting spam edits. I have made the book's source available in a Git repository, and indicated my willingness to accept patches/suggestions, by e-mail. I also intend to add blog-like comments to each recipe page. I feel that this is a reasonable compromise, but if the consensus is that a wiki would make more sense, I'll set it up. Another benefit of my approach is that I'm able to produce the book in different formats. I generate PDF and HTML at the moment, and would like to expand this to ePub, at least. Long term I'd like to offer a paperback version, as well, which again depends on consistent formatting of the source. I hope this goes some way to explaining why I'm being difficult. ;-) -- Run Paint Run Run <http://vim.runpaint.org/> / <http://twitter.com/runpaint> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
