Hacker News Reader

Comment by _gqhf | Hacker News Reader

Why are so many projects allergic to screenshots? You put so much work into something and you write a really good readme but then not a single image after stating 'Improved UX, that's still in line with Emacs traditions'.

View on HN

It really doesn't look any different from many other emacs set-ups and the actual appearance depends a lot on what the user has configured for themselves. The "out-of-the-box" look is minimal and optimized for keyboard, that's really all you can say about the appearance.

The "UX" in the case of Prelude is basically a curated set of "plug-ins" that "just work" and are organized in a way that is easier to maintain than if you accreted your dotemacs file over the course of years (or decades).

Prelude is a really low-friction way to get started with emacs "the right way" if you're choosing to go down that rabbit hole.

M-x screenshot even exists, and there are the elpa packages emacs-gif-screencast and keycast. It's so easy to do from right inside of emacs that there really isn't a good excuse. Less than stellar documentation is a pet peeve of mine and I try to submit small improvements to the documentation for the packages I use most often. I'd encourage everyone else that hates bad documentation to do the same. It's one of the easiest and most impactful ways to contribute to open source, and often something that the maintainers have difficulty doing simply because they can never view their project in the way a new user would.

I haven't used prelude so I don't know, but as an Emacs user the points described here https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/ would not suggest to me that they're something that can be represented well with screenshots. UX is user experience, which with Emacs is not necessarily visual.

They could just record the screen (https://obsproject.com) / terminal (https://asciinema.org/).

A gif then.

This is a great example of a generational shift in what UX/User Experience/Interface means. A person who's grown up with GUIs and post Web 2.0 interfaces wants to see your screenshots when you talk about UX. Most emacs users want to see the key mappings or talk about magit-style interfaces vs fuzzy tab-completion algorithms.

I don't want to see a screenshot. I want to see a heat map on the keys my left pinkie is responsible for.

I'd say, keymaps + GIFs are nice. For example, I may have never have tried magit or swiper[1] in its early days, if I had not seen someone use it. Keymaps I can configure rather easily, UI flows not so much.

[1] https://writequit.org/denver-emacs/presentations/2017-04-11-...

> Most emacs users want to see the key mappings

I can say absolute certainty that more inveterate emacs users would rather see a screenshot than a litany of keybindings.

Fair point, although as others have mentioned Prelude does look like stock Emacs in many ways. :-) I'll put a note to record some screencast in the future, as I think it will give a better idea of prospective users about the nature and features of Prelude.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com