this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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I beg you, if you are a developer of an open source app or program - add screenshots of your app to the README file. When looking for the perfect app, I had to install dozens of them just to see what the user interface looked like and whether it suits me. This will allow users to decide if the app they choose will suit them... Please, don't think about it, just do it....

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Me, developing a headless component library:

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be that dick, a headless component library is still meant to do something, show an example of it being used!

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What would the world even be like without people feeling the need to be a dick about an obvious joke 😘

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you've written a "usage" section that showcases more than one uselessly simple example that doesn't even work in the project's current state, you're already far ahead of the average.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is how I generally write documentation for my projects: https://tybalt.org

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Even for a CLI tool, there should be a real world example showing how it works and what the output looks like. Eg, for jq:

$ cat file.json
{"field: "value"}
$ jq '.field' file.json
"value"

And a few other examples.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I feel like maybe you don't know what a headless component library is. A cli has a head -- the terminal. Headless applications, by definition, have no visual portion. For instance, a headless browser is a browser where the web page renders in-memory, but never displays any content. A headless component library, then, is one where the implementor doesn't provide anything visual, only behavior. For web dev, is very helpful -- the library implementator writes all the js, but the css and html (the "head") are left to the user for use. The best headless component libraries, then have nothing to screenshot without the user supplying some implementation.