Cosmos looks awesome. Thank you for all your hard work. I've been using Storybook for a while, but I'll give Cosmos a try on my next project.
As someone who is currently learning React coming from a Rails background, the communities and their sensibilities couldn't be more different:
Rails: readability, simplicity, stability, "convention over configuration"
JS: the opposite
JS is a horrible kludge that malignantly outgrew its original purpose. Incidentally, it's also the programming language sites happen to use to become unusable and abuse the user, but we'd be in the same boat if they used Python or whatever else, so the hate for JS that comes out of that is unfair.
I know your take is balanced but others in HN loveeee to hate JS just because they think its what they are supposed to do.
I don't have a horse in this race though. I don't use Javascript or C++ in any meaningful capacity these days.
I do find some of the documentation/presentation à little bit confusing. I gather that when it says "fixture" - that means scaffolding to render a given component. When it says "visual tdd" - it does not mean to imply repeatable, automated red-green tests, but rather that it provides a sort of wysiwyg - or rather - wyciwys (what you code is what you see).
It's a band aid on the fact that we should be able to just draw widgets in a rich editor, but are stuck using text (code) to implement them?
(I don't mean band aid in a bad way for the project - it's just were we're at with web ux/ui. It's a bit like having postscript, but no wysiwyg dtp program to go with it).
Yes, Cosmos is very similar to Storybook. It's also older, and I'm only saying this because I'm tired of getting asked how does it differ. Both projects provide an isolated component environment to help tackle complexity in single page apps. The difference boils down to setup compatibility and personal taste.
I'm not gonna lie, some of the comments are tough to process, but what can you do. I still appreciate all feedback and as usual I'll try to incorporate it as best as I can.