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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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 [email protected]. I can help you figure out any other issues you have.
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