NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


a huge problem with linux-style command line tools is that there's no way to enumerate all of the options outside of digging through the manual every time, causing at least two context switches

this is MUCH WORSE with configuration files, where you can't tab complete your way through it unless your completer already knows.

the biggest problem I keep running into with NixOS is that none of the options are obvious or documented online, so I have to read the entire manual section just to know what option I need, about one in three times. Which often does not have useful examples.

I know i shouldn't whine when i could be writing the docs, but I can't -- i do not have the spare energy, I'm barely able to do much as is. But like,,, there's something missing

I think a big part of this is that there's no like, good pathway for submitting documentation to open source projects, and it's often with very high pushback if you write not-perfect docs for a thing that didn't exist before. and that needs to change


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

discoverability is the main reason i think command line tools and schemaless plain text config files are bad. and a schema only saves your plain text config file if it's in a format people's editors can parse and expose

TUIs help fix this a little but yeah -- a lot lost in the debate between GUI and CLI is that GUIs are about exposing options and CLIs are about streamlining known functions

there are workarounds (zsh completions and fish man-page-harvested-completions, for example) but they're workarounds and clunky

i have seen a handful of open source projects that say ‘wanna improve the docs? do a pull request at our github or w/e’ but for the most part yeah this seriously needs to improve