You're right that GitHub stars probably isn't the best metric of how good a plugin is. We try to use a more unbiased metric of relative # of actual users, and this we get by scraping dotfiles repos on GitHub, looking for references to Vim plugins. That's shown as the # users count to the left of stars on GitHub. It's also not perfect, but it's a useful source of relative usage statistics.
1. You can't have real and complete usage statistics so those metrics are at best meaningless and at worst misleading. Also, something being popular doesn't mean that it will fit one's workflow and needs.
2. Choosing a tool because of its perceived (through meaningless/misleading numbers) is not really the smarter way to build-up one's config.
All it is is a call to `window.scrollTo()` with some logic to determine the position of the element we want to scroll to. See [1] for the code of the actual function that does the scrolling. Is there acceleration? There doesn't seem to be on Chrome for Mac. :/
Oh, if you meant the little arrow ("»") that slides to the right on focus of a plugin, that's just the CSS 3 transition `all 0.1s ease-out` applied to a changing `left` and `opacity`. See [2] for code.
In fact, this was the first React project that he worked on -- he rewrote our old angular app within a week of when React first came out, and had been hooked since.
Cool! Does he have plans to write an article about his experience writing this in React? That would be an interesting read, especially since it's open source.
