Hacker News Reader

> Certain types of code should not be thoughtlessly copy/pasted, and providing multiline `$` prompts enforce that the user copy/pastes line by line.

I hardcore oppose this kind of thing, for the same reason I oppose people putting obstacles in the way of curl-to-bash.

Adding the prompt character doesn’t make people think, it just makes people press backspace. Frequently I’m reading a tutorial because I’m trying to assemble headless scripts for setting up a VM and I really just need verbatim lines I can copy/paste so I know I’ve got the right arguments.

Thanks for reading!

>Many tutorials reference many languages. (I frequently write tutorials for students that include bash, sql, and python.) Providing the prompts `$`, `sqlite>` and `>>>` makes it obvious which language a piece of code is being written in.

I think it's fine to show the prompt character, but I think it's the author's job to make sure that copy/paste still works. I've seen a lot of examples that use CSS to show the prompt or line number without it becoming part of copied text, and I'm highly in favor of that.

I think if I had to choose between breaking copy/paste and making the language obvious with the prompt character, I'd exclude the prompt, but I think that's a matter of taste.

>Certain types of code should not be thoughtlessly copy/pasted, and providing multiline `$` prompts enforce that the user copy/pastes line by line. A good example is a sequence of commands that involves `sudo dd` to format a harddrive. But for really intro-level stuff I want the student/reader to carefully think about all the commands, and forcing them to copy/paste line by line helps achieve that goal.

Yeah, I agree about preventing the reader from copy/pasting something dangerous.

In tutorials that require a reboot, I'll never include a reboot command bunched in with other commands because I don't want the user to do it by mistake. And I agree for something like `dd`, you'd want to present it in a way to make it hard for the reader to make mistakes or run it thoughtlessly.

> I've seen a lot of examples that use CSS to show the prompt or line number without it becoming part of copied text, and I'm highly in favor of that.

This is unfortunately not compatible with writing the tutorial in markdown to be rendered on github.

I'm not sure about that. There are markdown rendering engines where you can specify the language of a codeblock and it will render with specific CSS based on the language. So you can do something like ```bash ... ``` and it will show the code with newlines prefixed by "$"

AFAIK specifying a language only makes a difference for syntax highlighting. I have never seen a markdown processor that would add prompts to the code based on the specified language.

Syntax highlighting is just CSS. There's nothing stopping you from adding your own custom CSS to the code block which will prefix lines with the prompts.

Yes, of course. I was just describing what most existing engines currently do.

That's only for highlighting.

```bash assumes content is a valid shell script

```console assumes content is a dialog between a user and a computer, with $ or such prompts and unprefixed program output

Console sessions showing output is why you can't magically auto-prefix every line with a prompt.

I always include a $ in front of terminal commands (and > for Windows).

My books are Python related, so there is code that runs in putting and code that runs in other environments.

I guess I'm not really writing "tutorials" in the sense of webpages, so I'm less concerned with copy paste working and more concerned with clarity.