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Comment by pard68 | Hacker News Reader

I personally have found there is something of an art to a good readme. So folks can make one that is informative and visual, others can't. I have a project or two that suffered because my readme designing skills suck, then talented friend PR'd a great readme with screenshots and such.

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It may be an art, but I wouldn't say it takes much talent to include a screenshot, GIF or YouTube link! Most likely he just didn't give it much thought.

Speaking only for myself, often a project is in a half-finished state, and any provided screenshot would quickly become out of date.

Your audiences imagination is probably even worse!

You could probably automate a tool to take screenshot for you.

This sounds like a slippery slope into yak-shaving…next thing you’ll open source your automated screen-shorting tool, and it will require a readme of its own!

Should I write a new screenshot tool for the screenshot tool's readme?

Sounds something like charm’s vhs: https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

Weirdly even commercial software websites seem to do this a lot. Pages of text and some mostly-unrelated images with no screenshots at all. Sometimes you can learn more about a program from screenshots of it in Google Images than from the official website.

Agree totally - I want to see whether the controls for what I want to use the software for are in prominent positions, buried deep in some menu, or completely non-existent. I also want to see what other UI fluff is crowding out those controls and becoming distracting for me and my users, and how bloated the application is around other tasks that I have no use for.

It's not the sole way to evaluate usefulness of software obviously, but it can help save a lot of time if it's clear from screenshots or videos if its not a good fit for my needs.

Honestly half the time the site doesn't even describe what the software is for. They'll be like "CRE8TR TAKES CREATIVITY TO A NEW LEVEL", "Used by industry professionals worldwide!" If you've just come from a random link on Hacker News or something they can be incredibly vague.

Once again, a screenshot immediately shows me "oh, it's a UI wireframing tool."

Your are absolutely a software engineer. Counter point for counter point sake.

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