Consider gif/video on top of README

[tuurep]

One thing that is so great about https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim is the gif on the readme, where you can understand everything by just seeing that.

I showed Vivify to one of my friends and he thought we should have a gif too 😄

@jannis-baum @Tweekism what do you think about this idea?

[tuurep]

Oh and I specifically mean demoing Vim/Neovim usage although viv can be used more generally, this is the most demoable scenario.

[Tweekism]

I am a big fan of the readme gifs

[jannis-baum]

Same here, big fan. Would be great to have one. The idea of showcasing the live preview makes sense. Maybe with some of the "additional" features.

Should we add the same gif to the vim plugin repo as well?

[jannis-baum]

Haha, you caught me there on the icon🙈 I think I was doing something on some other branch before and hadn't rebased yet

Oh, interesting! I thought you'd have light mode in Vim as well ^^ Actually, I think we could do 2 versions of the GIF, one for dark and one for light mode and have the correct one show up on GitHub based on the GitHub theme. Do you have a light color theme for Vim?

[tuurep]

😄

have the correct one show up on GitHub based on the GitHub theme.

Oh, I didn't know it's possible to have a README segment that's conditional on something like that (are you sure it is?)

Do you have a light color theme for Vim?

No and I've never used any, but could always install some light theme for the purpose of the gif

[Tweekism]

@tuurep Here is an example of light / dark theme auto select thingy on GitHub (second screenshot)

https://github.com/Tweekism/iso-clock

[jannis-baum]

No and I've never used any, but could always install some light theme for the purpose of the gif

Okay then maybe I'll do that and record both so they look more similar. I'll do it in the next days

[tuurep]

Ok, thanks!

[jannis-baum]

I still haven't gotten to record this but one thing we can already think about in the meantime is where to store the GIF. The two options that come to my mind are

1. In the docs/. This is the simplest option but means that anyone who clones the main branch has to download the (potentially large) GIF.
2. On a separate orphan branch that is just for showcase assets. Explained here and I did this for another repo of mine that you can check as an example. Benefit is that it keeps main tidy & small, potentially quite significant disadvantage is that Vivify doesn't understand the syntax (i.e. couldn't display the GIF) and it wouldn't make any sense/be feasible to support it ^^

[tuurep]

Sorry I missed that I shoulda given an opinion on it 😄

Yes for sure method 2 is good especially because you already know how

If we're worried that we are going to demo using the README and it will show a gif that doesn't render, we can of course demo on some other file than the README 😄 Really doesn't matter which.

But the idea of showing tests/rendering/markdown-additional.md at some point was really good

[jannis-baum]

True, I wasn't even thinking about the demo per se. Just in general the fact that Vivify won't be able to display its own README if we go for method 2😁

[tuurep]

Ah, didn't realize it's able to view gifs otherwise? Not something I ever ran into yet 😄

Edit: yeah indeed it does

Yes actually it's a good point.

Well, I'd be fine either way.

[tuurep]

Looking at the first gif I could find the size was 176K so my huge images are definitely worse here.. :D

[jannis-baum]

I still haven't gotten to do this but I realized there's an easy solution to use the assets branch and still have Vivify be able to display it's README: We just put the GitHub link into the Markdown file, then it will fetch it from there as long as there's internet