Changes: Vim Tips Wiki:About

Revision as of 08:43, 17 January 2008

Description

The Vim Tips wiki is a place where users of the Vim editor can add their favorite commands, macros and other assorted tips to a common database. While the Vim distribution comes with a rich set of documentation it is often hard to find a place to start when trying to incrementally learn how to use the editor.

Genesis

The original Vim Tips web site at http://www.vim.org/tips/ was closed in February 2007 because it became too difficult to deal with spam. The Vim mailing list was used to discuss migration of the tips database to a wiki.

The discussions continued until June 2007 when Bastl decided to be bold – he set up Wikia software on a local computer, and wrote scripts to import the tips from html scraped from the vim.org web site (see the notes on the import).

There were many problems with the import, for example, some tips had titles with characters that are not allowed on the wiki, and many tips had characters in the text that caused problems with the template originally used to format tips. These, and other, problems were overcome by January 2008 using scripts developed by JohnBeckett that were used to massage the tips on this wiki. Several other contributors have done a lot of work cleaning up tips.

Archive of early discussions

Some of the vim@vim.org mailing list discussions concerning the Vim Tips wiki project can be viewed below.

Future

This depends highly on you, the contributors!

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+__NOTOC__
-=== Description ===
+===Description===
-The Vim Wikia is a place where users of the vim editor can add their favorite commands, macros and other assorted tips to a common database. While the vim distribution comes with a rich set of documentation it is often hard to find a place to start when trying to incrementally learn how to use the editor.
+The Vim Tips wiki is a place where users of the [http://www.vim.org/ Vim editor] can add their favorite commands, macros and other assorted tips to a common database. While the Vim distribution comes with a rich set of documentation it is often hard to find a place to start when trying to incrementally learn how to use the editor.
-=== Genesis ===
+===Genesis===
+The original Vim Tips web site at http://www.vim.org/tips/ was closed in February 2007 because it became too difficult to deal with spam. The [http://www.vim.org/maillist.php Vim mailing list] was used to discuss migration of the tips database to a wiki.
+The discussions continued until June 2007 when [[User:Bastl|Bastl]] decided to '''be bold''' &ndash; he set up Wikia software on a local computer, and wrote scripts to import the tips from html scraped from the vim.org web site (see the [[User:Bastl/Notes on the import|notes on the import]]).
-When the tips database collapsed due to spamming, Bram closed it. The idea was to use a wiki instead. There were a lot of discussions on the right technology etc. but finally we got here and all the tips were imported from the original database.
+There were many problems with the import, for example, some tips had titles with characters that are not allowed on the wiki, and many tips had characters in the text that caused problems with the template originally used to format tips. These, and other, problems were overcome by January 2008 using scripts developed by [[User:JohnBeckett|JohnBeckett]] that were used to massage the tips on this wiki. Several [[Special:Listusers|other contributors]] have done a lot of work cleaning up tips.
-=== Future ===
+===Archive of early discussions===
+Some of the vim@vim.org mailing list discussions concerning the Vim Tips wiki project can be viewed below.
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80037 VimWiki - again - but with a brand new option]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80254 Vim Wiki - Wiki Template Proposal]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80297 wiki hosting]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80318 Vim Wiki - Tip Page Formatting Deadline]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80412 Vim Wiki - Tip id and URL]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80591 VimWiki - referring to vimdoc]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80658 VimWiki - Page Titles]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80688 VimWiki - First Beta]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/80930 VimWiki - released finally]
+*[http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vim/message/81000 VimWiki: New Tips]
+===Future===
 This depends highly on you, the contributors!