MINI now has its own site
Hello, Neovim users!
For the entirety of the ‘mini.nvim’/MINI project its main place of documentation was GitHub. It means that “official” links to module READMEs and help files were something like https://github.com/nvim-mini/mini.nvim/blob/main/readmes/mini-ai.md and https://github.com/nvim-mini/mini.nvim/blob/126ce3328c78399dcff58272f6f540a373b62a75/doc/mini-ai.txt#L1. But not any more!
Please welcome nvim-mini.org! It is a long-time-in-the-works project that is finally public. It required a careful work of updating ‘mini.nvim’ documentation to be usable in both built-in :help and in this auto-generated site (it uses Quarto and custom Lua scripts).
Here are the improvements a dedicated site brings (apart form adding a bit more credibility to the project):
Own blog which is already populated with posts I made on Reddit for nearly four years. The main benefit is that it makes it harder to take those posts away from the web, which was a real issue for me, unfortunately. Plus it opens possibilities to create posts that can be freely linked on different blog post aggregation sites.
Generated ‘mini.nvim’ documentation: both READMEs, change log, and help files. The latter is much more readable and usable than linking to a “*.txt” file on GitHub:
- It has
:helplike highlighting. - It auto-links tag links (like the one on which you can press
<C-]>and navigate to its target), making reading and navigation much better. And not only it links within ‘mini.nvim’ tags, it also links to neovim.io documentation for built-in tags as well! - It creates more robust links to help sections (like ‘mini.pick’ overview) and change log entries (like ‘mini.completion’ changes in v0.16.0). The latter is not possible on GitHub because it doesn’t handle duplicating headings very well for this task.
There are still downsides to this approach, of course. Links to documentation are not “immutable” (like GitHub’s links to a specific commit) and now only display documentation of the ‘main’ branch. I’ll see what I can do here (like maybe provide snapshots of documentations for releases), but this is not the highest priority right now.
- It has
A more suitable place to document things outside of ‘mini.nvim’ plugin but within MINI project. Which are planned and should be coming soon-ish (I hope)!
All in all, I am very happy to finally have a dedicated website for the project.
Thank you all for reading this post and supporting MINI. Hope to meet you soon!