Writing Learn Vimscript the Hard Way

A long, mostly boring screencast of me writing one of the chapters of http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/

Hey guys, this is Steve Losh.

If you're watching this screencast you probably already know that I've been writing a book

called "Learn Vimscript the Hard Way".

I figured I'd do a screencast while I wrote one of the shorter chapters

just to show you kind of how I work and how I'm making the book.

So first what I'm going to do is open an iTerm window...

and let's make it nice and big... okay.

I'm going to open DVTM, which is -- it's a terminal multiplexer, kind of like Tmux or Screen,

just a lot simpler. I don't really use all the functionality of Tmux or Screen,

so DVTM does pretty much everything I need.

And I'm going to open three splits with one of them a little smaller.

I'm going to go into the repo for the book in each of them.

In this window I'm going to run a little script -- a little program called "kicker",

which is open source, it's Ruby so you can just "gem install kicker".

What it does is it basically monitors all the files that you tell it

and whenever any one of them changes it just runs a command.

Any shell command you want.

So in this case I'm the command that builds the book,

so any time I make a change to the book it will automatically get built, which is really handy.

So I'm going to run that, and it fires off -- oops, sorry, I need to be in the virtualenv.

"workon" the virtualenv... okay. Now I'm going to run kicker... okay.

And it goes ahead and does it once to begin with,

and then any time I touch a file that I told it to watch,

so if I go here and say "touch preface" you can it executes again.

Okay. The other thing I'm going to do is "cd" into the "build" directory,

where the output of Bookmarkdown is going to put the HTML files,

and I'm just going to run "serve_this", which is a little alias

that basically serves the current directory on port 8000.

And if you want to see what it is, it's just a Python module -- it's just

"python -m SimpleHTTPServer"

SimpleHTTPServer is a built-in Python module,

so anywhere that has Python, I mean a relatively recent version, will have this.

So it's just a simple command to serve a directory on port 8000.

And I'm going to open Firefox and open localhost:8000.

Alright, so this is our book, right, this is what I've got so far.

I'm going to move that over here... okay,

ah, we don't need it that big.

Alright, we've got a book. And now I'm just going to open Vim and start working.

I'm not going to comment on everything and explain how I do everything

because that would just take forever.

Everything's in my muscle memory and I'd have to stop and think about every key I press

so if you see something that I do and you're kinda wondering how I did it

just leave a comment with the time in the video that it appears and I'll do my best to explain it for you.

With that said, I'm just going to put my headphones on and start typing. Cool.

Okay guys, I think that's about it.

I'm going to encode this screencast and upload it to Vimeo and that should be about it.

Like I said, if there's anything that you saw and you liked and you want to know how I did it

or you think I have a special mapping,

just post a comment on the video and -- or just tweet at me, either one --

and just let me know the time and what it looks like and I'll let you know.

Otherwise I guess that's it. Alright, cool. Thanks guys.