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Comment by mperham | Hacker News Reader

It would be useful if the readme said what this program actually does.

This is a general issue with GitHub repos - people write awesome software and then their Curse of Knowledge causes them to think people open the repo and immediately know what it does. I wonder how much good open source gets ignored by less than amateur computer science folks like me.

This rings so true to me as well. I cant keep track of all the things ive passed up looking at or using because the readme gave no info on what it is actually supposed to do.

I would just like to piggyback on this and say that in addition to this, an image or two goes a long way people. Especially if your program has a GUI!

This project predates github repos. The README file was renamed from a READ.ME file in the original source distribution. Finding out what a piece of software is worked differently back then. Not sure how though.

You would read the printed manual

Or the magazine article...

You would type in the code from the listing at the end of the article.

those were the times. PEEKS and POKES and a list of numbers. ah, fond memories

Or maybe it included a textfile with the .nfo extension, which contained an ASCII-art skull.

Its clearly missing the file_id.diz file

Looks like FILE_ID.DIZ appeared in the 90s and this software predates it.

I agree, in the meantime the following quotes are directly from their groff manpage[0]:

> mmv - move/copy/append/link multiple files by wildcard patterns

> Rename files ending in .html.en, .html.de, etc. to ending in .en.html, .de.html, etc. in the current directory:

> mmv '*.html.??' '#1.#2#3.html'

[0]: https://github.com/rrthomas/mmv/blob/master/mmv-include.man

One of the two issues open is "Rewrite README" made by the maintainer fourteen hours ago.

"man mmv" tells it all.

I don't have mmv installed so that doesn't do a great deal.

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