Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012)

Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by Quekid5 on Thursday August 11, 2022 @02:59PM (#32430203)

That text file and your editor is two layers of abstraction (at least, because there's parsing involved, e.g. how to i specify timouts? sizes? Can I use "MiB", "s", "ms", etc?).

The thing we want to optimize for is "how easy is to change a setting". Firefox's "about:" seems like a reasonable approach for expert users.

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Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by pessimizer on Thursday August 11, 2022 @04:09PM (#32431086)

> how to i specify timouts? sizes? Can I use "MiB", "s", "ms", etc?

These issues neither disappear nor improve when you hide the settings in a mystery binary.

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Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by Quekid5 on Thursday August 11, 2022 @05:21PM (#32431863)

I agree, which is why I mentioned the "about:" thing.

It would be nice to have a base level of types that all programs could agree on.

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Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by nequo on Thursday August 11, 2022 @03:17PM (#32430433)

But the abstraction that is the text editor is shared across many programs. You can use your favorite text editor to edit any of the plain-text configs that you need. Firefox’s about: and the way to edit it are specific to Firefox.

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Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by Quekid5 on Friday August 12, 2022 @06:46PM (#32444870)

Well, yes, but we were imagining a world with a sort of universal "about:", I think?

You wouldn't even need that many basic types to cover about 90%+ of the state space. Of course, there would be bonus points if applications could define their own types in a UI-meaningful way.

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