Pain Points: CLI

[martinheidegger]

Collection of pain points when internationalising a nodejs CLI tool:

• IME input can interfere with user input
• Double width characters break ASCII layouting
• Lack of standardized negotiation system (with language store)

[srl295]

• Double Width- Unicode East Asian Width property distinguishes a vs ａ etc. Also affected by combining.

[watilde]

Double Width -Currently there is no way to get the width of the East Asian Width in Node.js. In npm, it is fixed by using option. https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11781

[martinheidegger]

I havn't tried it out yet but I think that the man-files also are not translated?!

[watilde]

@martinheidegger ahh that may be true. Let me take a look into it.

[sam-github]

@martinheidegger I've never seen that man feature of npm used, most devs on windows and OS X don't use man pages or even know what they are. It looks to me like you could include man pages for all the language sections in the package.json, though. They would all get installed, of course.

[martinheidegger]

@sam-github It is prominently used by npm.

$ npm show npm man

[ '/Users/rebecca/code/release/npm-3/man/man1/npm-access.1',
  '/Users/rebecca/code/release/npm-3/man/man1/npm-adduser.1',
  ...
  '/Users/rebecca/code/release/npm-3/man/man7/removing-npm.7',
  '/Users/rebecca/code/release/npm-3/man/man7/semver.7' ]

[sam-github]

@martinheidegger Used by npm, sure, but used by users of npm? I very much doubt that many people know that man npm-ls is a non-portable alternative to the portable npm help ls, with identical text.

[watilde]

I started to implement i18n in npm on https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/12298