wacky sketches in Vim (to me this is thinking-together)

What is it?

thanks for the comment. i’m a bit reluctant to answer ‘what’ directly, since • i’m interested in what you make of them without much framing • as ‘sketches’ they really are open for interpretation/insight but thanks for asking; here’s a bit more orientation & i can elaborate more if you want • these are three sketches from a broader set, just to give the flavor of them • each one is just a unicode text file open in a Vim editor. anything ‘special’ beyond basic navigation is annotated in the file. • a general theme is me trying to get a better grasp on the spatial & physical nature of text editing • sketch #1 is about embedding multiple spatial dims in a single vertical dim. no macros are involved, i’m just using “*” and “#” to ‘jump to next/prev match’ on different labels to ‘move’ in ‘view space’ along spatially embedded axes. each ‘frame’ is found in a different part of the file. • sketch #2 is roughly about ‘direct manipulation’ of code/data/environment. idk if you’re familiar with Vim, but all editor commands can be recorded as plaintext macros & replayed on command. i’m just going a step further and saving macros in the doc/executing them from the doc • sketch #3 is a birds eye view of an afternoon prototyping session; gives some sense of the ‘sketchbook’ feel of the approach • overall, this approach (i.e., sketching directly in Vim plaintext) is the first concrete instance where i can recognize a semblance of the inchoate thing i’ve been incubating. it also captures more ‘computer nature’ than some of the pen & tablet experiments i’ve seen, though that’s def a place i want to converge on at some point

Looks super tantalizing!