Stride

Stride can most easily be described as "vim for design." It's a keyboard-driven UI/UX tool that is geared toward design engineers, and takes inspiration from several ideas I developed while working on Matry as a programming language.

Design Principles

Stride is governed by a few key principles:

1. Efficiency begets power. The raison d'etre of a professional tool should be to empower you, and most of the time that means getting out of your way.
2. Power over familiarity. Professional tools shouldn't be afraid to depart dramatically from long-standing conventions, if doing so empowers their users.
3. Design should be performed in the target medium. If you're designing for the web, then the browser should be your working environment.
4. Drawing tools are not equipped to solve modern design problems. At scale, designing a product often means creating a system, and text is better suited for that purpose than graphical illustrations.
5. Designers and developers should collaborate on the same artifact. In the game industry, artists and developers actively collaborate together on the final product, yet for web and mobile app development, this has never been the case. Why shouldn't it be?
6. Design tools should be framework-agnostic. Lots of new design tools output to React, but the only realistic future is one where a design tool can output to any target. Stride outputs to an intermediate representation, which can then be transpiled into any format you wish.

Overview

Stride uses a mnemonic command system that is inspired by Vim Motions, in the sense that it attempts to feel like natural language. For example, in the same way that Vim's d w command means "delete word", Stride has the command a s, which means "add shape." And in the same way you can think of Vim Motions as a DSL for text editing, you can also think of Stride as a command language for UI editing.

Below is an incomplete list of currently available commands. Many more will be added in the future.

Roadmap

Currently, Stride only exists as a prototype. In the fully fleshed out version, the plan is to build:

• Workspace/project/file system structure
• Collaborative editing
• Search menu for fonts, icons, images, etc
• Asset management
• Components
• Built-in package registry
• Plugin ecosystem
• CI/CD integration
• A lot more...

Command Reference