I didn't really enjoy learning vector calculus in college, but I wanted to relearn the material. Like any reasonable person the first place I looked for resources was wikipedia, where I came across the sentence
"Vector calculus was developed from quaternion analysis by J. Willard Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside near the end of the 19th century."
This seems like it might be a fun way to approach the subject, as working through problems historically often helps motivate them, and I'd like to develop additional intuition for both quaternions and vector calculus, but it seems like the approach was abandoned.
Are there any good textbooks which use this approach? Is it really that cumbersome to use quaternions instead of vectors for the calculus of up to $\mathbb R^3$?