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Comment by cookguyruffles | Hacker News Reader

It is a little frivolous, but "signaldctl" is the most horridly awkward naming for the command line tool. The letters "ctl" are in a terrible location on the keyboard for smooth typing, but ignoring that, it doesn't even fit in typical naming where "signald" would have a "signalctl" binary to control it

Of course you can't really use "signal" because that's the name of the official product, but it still feels like there are better alternatives than the handful that was chosen

(Apologies for pulling a HN classic and being the only comment on the thread complaining about something dumb. At least it wasn't a comment on the web page type face!)

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Not everyone uses qwerty (or the same layout in general), so complaining about how hard it is to type a certain string of letters doesn't seem like the job of an individual program to fix. It is a very rare and interesting complaint, however.

By the way, is your issue with the t? I think c and l should actually not be too bad to hit, even on qwerty. They're not in the middle two columns, and they don't use your pinkies.

With Workman, c is moved over one to the right, t is where f is in qwerty, and l is where m is in qwerty. So, t doesn't need me to stretch, and all of them become keys pressed with my index fingers, but since you may not like where qwerty c is already, I wonder if this would even be an improvement to you. It does put c and t much closer together, but both are still pressed with the left hand, and then l with the right. Not sure if hand alternation is part of what you had in mind.

Yup, it's the t :) It knocks me out of touchtype mode (or at least makes it awkward to keep going) I think just due to the sheer distance from both finger locations. A left-hand stroke from c -> t is awkward, using right hand for it seems even worse

signald author here, open to suggestions on that name. As you've noticed, I try to avoid using the word "signal". I do agree that the current name is pretty awkward.

edit: the name for signaldctl. I'm not looking to rename signald at this time

Not that I particularly think there's anything wrong with signaldctl, but for other apps that employ a daemon/control model, I've always found <service_name>d and <service_name>-cli combo to be good naming scheme.

So signald and signal-cli in this case.

well "signal-cli" is already in use by https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli (which signald is a fork of)

Sorry for "invading" an unrelated reply, but thanks for your work! I discovered signald an hour ago and I'm really happy about it.

I'm pretty sure that's the way for a better desktop experience with Signal, but I still need to test a few clients. Even before that, with signaldctl and the Python libs alone I already have a way of sending notifications, etc.

It's fine. You're borrowing from the systemd/systemctl pattern. That would suggest signald/signalctl, but signaldctl works too.

This being said, looking one level up the "bigger picture" chain "signalprotocold" comes to mind - but then "signalprotocoldctl" would give me a small headache :), and I don't know a good solution there. "spdctl" sounds it would be for a DIMM EEPROM configuration (???), "sigprotoctl" sounds nice if somewhat random, and... ugh, naming things is hard.

Well, how about beacon.

It also happens that most tlds with beacond are available.

Cursory search on GitHub says you would be pretty alone in your use of beancond as well.

langis (signal backwards).

I'll assume it's a terrible idea, whisperd and whisperclient are probably too on the nose.

Beacon is pretty great =)

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