Thu 30 January 2025

I'm noticing a troubling trend among FOSS projects, even terminal-only utilities: no manpages (or a 1-paragraph useless one), barely any help screens, and a link to a wiki site like a github page or "readthedocs."

The thing is, the whole ethos behind so many terminal utilities is a hearkening back to a simpler time of keyboard-driven user interfaces, and specifically of eschewing the kind of bloated, unusable mess that characterizes so much of the modern web.

So please don't force me to crank up firefox just to read your docs. They should be included in some kind of plain text (or easily convertible) format along with the source and binary distributions of your package.

Heck, I'd even settle for a PDF at this point, so please:

Keep your online documentation offline. (Because online means on the computer, not on the web, behind some horrid cluodflare captcha just to read five pages of a wiki).

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 6

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload BSD Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Linux Non-religious post Polemic Productivity UNIX