things humans are bad at: memorising specific sequences of words

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@semitones the manual for vim is just one sentence: throw your computer out the window

[semitones@tiny.tilde.website]

@bri7 I really liked GarageBand. That took something difficult (digital audio) and made it pretty intuitive at least to high school me.

[evin@gts.yujiri.xyz]

@bri7 i mean, the abbreviations are there for a good reason: when you type something so often, brevity is more important than readability

of course, they could stand to be more easily discoverable. and the abbreviations could just be aliases for longer command names

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@evin the abbreviations are literally there because the software was originally written for an actual mechanical teletypewriter, connected via 150baud modem, which are slow and have extremely limited horizontal space

[evin@gts.yujiri.xyz]

@bri7 it doesn't matter why they were historically invented, my point is that their continued existence serves a worthy purpose

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@evin i don’t think so.
we definitely aren’t using teletype machines anymore. it’s not hard or slow to type the entire word. autocomplete is even available-

just not built into unix shells

[evin@gts.yujiri.xyz]

@bri7 autocomplete for command names actaully *is* built into unix shells, at least all the ones i've tried (bash, fish, zsh) but it's still much slower than abbreviations for something so common. i actually think they should be shorter. i set up 1 char aliases for most of mine

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@evin are you confusing tab complete for autocomplete?

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@kirtai@tech.lgbt @bri7@social.treehouse.systems man for whatever reason invokes less as a pager instead of something smarter that understands its output (unlike info & info manuals).

So mostly if you want something that can browse it smartly you've got to look somewhere else (such as in Emacs). You're otherwise stuck with literal text search and no navigation aids.

Assuming bash-doc (or your distro's equivalent) is installed, evaluation of the following Elisp brings to the section I mentioned in another post: (info "(bash) Commands For Completion")

[kirtai@tech.lgbt]

@lispi314 @bri7
I recently read an article (I can no longer find) about how terrible the rendering of man pages is. It doesn't even support hyperlinks to other man pages.

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@kirtai @bri7 The BSD variants of roff & its various compilers do get fancier, sometimes, but the GNU & other Linux-associated ones just suck.

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

POSIX internals is second nature to us software engineers, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows bash, readline, and one or two ansi escape codes.

> and emacs

of course

> of course

[apophis@yourwalls.today]

@bri7 the FM is just a specific sequence of words that RT-ing is intended to partially memorize

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@apophis excellent point

[apophis@yourwalls.today]

@kirtai @bri7 the letters RTFM stand for Roo Tong, Fidn't Mead

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@apophis @kirtai Read THAT?
fuck me

[apophis@yourwalls.today]

@bri7 @kirtai i was honestly actually surprised that bash *had* a manpage because i thought that they were for, like, relatively quick guides for stuff because you couldn't be expected to just... remember all that, hit Q and do your thing

but i guess this was made for folks who had a better affordance for writing things down in physical notebooks or printing stuff out

[apophis@yourwalls.today]

@bri7 @kirtai (i am intentionally discounting having multiple terminal emulator windows open because i'm pretty sure this system must've been developed before that)

[apophis@yourwalls.today]

@lispi314 @bri7 @oblomov what if for every command that wasn't recognized it gave you a "it seems like you're trying to ___ would any of these fit?" and a list of commands and brief descriptions?

that's basically what a search engine would do

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@apophis @bri7 @oblomov Such suggestion systems already exist but crucially they are suggestions only.

They do not replace reliable input.

There's a point of diminishing returns though. (Over?)Use of LLM-based suggestions is empirically correlated with deskilling and a preserved loss of reliability.