Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pawamoy | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's because I'm so used to find, but I had a bad UX with fd. This is my thought process each time I use it: "Why separating the extension from the filename? Is this a default? Can we change it? What is the option, -e? Or -e is the option to 'exec'? What's the flag to include hidden files? Or are they already included? Does the pattern comes before the directory? Does it need a directory or does it search it the current one? man fd, man fd, man fd."

I guess my brain just refuses to remember these for some reason.

View on HN

Author of fd here. Thank you for your feedback.

If you feel that there is anything we could to to improve fd's UX, it would be great if you could share it on GitHub: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

> Why separating the extension from the filename? Is this a default

It does not need to be! You can just also just use "fd README.md". Admittedly, the "." will actually search for any character (regex), so if you want to be precise, you need to escape it.

Right, there's always going to be some additional cognitive overhead with every new tool you adopt. The question is how much you value its benefits for your use case, and is it worth those costs. If you're so used to find, and it works great for you, then keep using it! It's indeed more powerful and standard than fd, which I think is well-suited for vast majority of simple use cases (casual use).

However, here's my reasoning for the first of your questions, as a happy fd user who switched from GNU find. Maybe it can give you insight into why the UX is designed as it is.

The extension is distinguished from the filename because it's a common use case (-e jpg less keystrokes than -iname '*.jpg'), it's semantically separate from the filename (IMO) and therefore should not be treated as part of it. And unlike filenames, extensions most often do not need to be pattern matched. If you want to match multiple extensions, just repeat the -e flag e.g. -e jpg -e png.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com