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Feature request: man-page which program + terminology?

Open Icy-Thought opened this issue 3 years ago • 2 comments

Why would this help improve the project?

Reason: to shed light on the new terminology for someone who has previously not encountered these terms prior to their first interaction with nix-tree.

Also, a man-page similar to nix would be appreciated. That is to say that nix-tree --help redirects the user to the man-page itself.

Alternative solution: create a "man page" that an be accessed inside the application through ? + m or something of that sort.

Icy-Thought avatar Dec 10 '22 15:12 Icy-Thought

Thank you, I do think this would be very useful.

I believe it'd be easy to implement this technically as you suggested:

  • We populateman nix-tree
  • nix-tree --help would execute man nix-tree instead
  • Help shortcut in nix-tree can also open the man page, and exiting it would go back to the application
    • I think with your other suggestion on #49 , the contents of the help modal right now would become redundant anyway.

But I guess I do not have a clear idea on what that man page should look like. Currently nix-tree have some docs here: https://github.com/utdemir/nix-tree#usage . They don't seem enough to be, but I'm unsure what else I should add. Do you have any ideas? What kind of structure does that man-page needs?

utdemir avatar Dec 10 '22 16:12 utdemir

The man-page in my opinion needs to be an explanation of what certain features in the program does and perhaps even explain why they work that way. For example, I was confused by what Closure Size and NAR Size meant when I first started using the program. (never came across those terms before now, which explains the reason for my confusion)

The style of the man-pages could also be of a TL;DR style to not have people become bored of the man-pages while reading it and instead retain that information in the GitHub repository if so desired.

And for how you could style the man-page, take a look at man nix. :)

Icy-Thought avatar Dec 10 '22 18:12 Icy-Thought