this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Programming
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One thing that wasn't mentioned in the article is default settings. In so many CLI programs (and FOSS in general), there seems to be some kind of allergy to default settings. I don't know whether it's a fear of doing the wrong thing, or a failure to sympathize with users who haven't spent the last three months up to their elbows in whatever the program does. But so often I've come to a new program, and if I've managed to stick with it, come to the realization later that at least half of the settings I needed to research for hours and enter manually every time could have been set to static defaults or easily-derived assumptions based on other settings in 99% of cases. Absolutely let your users override any and all defaults, but please use defaults.
I'd also be interested in the overlap between people saying, "LOL just get gud" about using the command line, and people who are terrified of using C++.
I feel the same. I don't like how people always recommend starter kits to Vim/Emacs beginners, for example. I think they'd actually learn something, if, at first, they did things the intended way.