Hacker News Reader

Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the most common errors that open source projects make: not providing screenshots, not providing info for the beginner. There is almost always some "help us" or "documentation" corner on the web pages, but the screenshots, even if it is just a CLI tools, are too often missing.

View on HN

Even a fricking "this is what it does" or "this is why our tool/distro/service is better than the thousands of alternatives" seems to be beyond most open source projects and startups. It doesn't help that the current trend is to just put up a flat landing page with exlcusively wishy-washy feel-good self-felating about their team, their mission. If the only thing I can learn about your product is that you are a group of hip young creative people who want to make my life easier in some unspecified way, I'm NOT going to sign up for a trial.

What's the point of screenshotting CLI tools? I'd much rather have an example command line that I can copy/paste than some image of a terminal...

I, for one, have been helped much by some project providing screenshots or even animated gifs of input and possible output by a tool...

https://asciinema.org is a great alternative to providing animated gifs.

And, for everyone's benefit, LICEcap[1] is a FOSS tool to make just that (animated GIFs showcasing your software) from the guy responsible for Winamp and Reaper DAW (the GIF's on the Reaper page are made using this tool).

[1]https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

For me it is about seeing how a tool can be used and if it is worth installing. I am not going to bother install a tool and then try a command to see if it is worthwhile to have on my computer. I try to keep my computer junk-free so I only install something if I believe if its any worth for me.

Sure, I'm not saying you shouldn't see example command lines and their outputs. I'm just saying putting that in image form seems really stupid—I don't understand the desire/need. Anything that's in a gif should just be inline in the page as real text that you can copy and paste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com