tldr-sh-client VS navi-tldr-pages

I like tldr with sh client. Simple and POSIX compliant.

> While I find projects in those other languages to also have too many dependencies, it's no where near what happens in JS apps. I'm thinking of projects I've recently worked on in Rust, PHP, and Java.

My experience with these new languages is such that this feels a bit unfair. It's like insisting that a disaster with 1000 fatalities is "much worse" than one with "only". It's ... true ... I guess, but there's something uncomfortable about making the comparison. Something has gone badly wrong if the comparison even needs to happen in the first place.

What I'm getting at is that e.g. Rust has an enormous problem in this area. It's not uncommon for me to see Node projects with over a thousand transitive dependencies, but on the other hand, I very frequently see Rust projects with over a hundred. And the Node projects tend to be more complicated than the Rust ones; they do more.

Take the last Rust program I tried to use, tealdeer. [1] If you don't know, tldr is a project that provides alternative simplified man pages for commonly used programs that consist entirely of easy to understand examples for the program. [2] What a tldr client needs to do is simply to check a local cache for each lookup, and if necessary update the cache online. It's a trivial problem that can be, and has been! [3], solved in a few hundred lines of shell (if you're being extremely verbose). How many recursive dependencies would you guess tealdeer uses? Depends on how you count, of course, but as of today the answer is ~133 deduplicated dependencies! For a program that's a glorified wrapper around curl!

Or another Rust program I looked at recently, rua [4]. In Arch Linux, the AUR is a repository of user maintained scripts for building and installing software as native Arch packages. Official tools for the building and installing software already exist for Arch, but it is common for users to use a wrapper around these tools that makes fetching and updating the software from the AUR easier. It's a relatively simple task that (once again) can be done with shell scripts. rua is such a wrapper. As of today it uses 137 deduplicated dependencies!

These Rust programs are simple terminal tools to do tasks that are almost trivial in nature. And yet they require hundreds of constantly updating dependencies! The situation may well be better than what you'll find for Node, but it's undeniably disastrous compared to either simpler languages without a built in package manager (like C) or more complicated batteries-included languages where best practices continue to prevail (like Python).

[1] https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer

[2] https://tldr.sh/

[3] https://github.com/raylee/tldr-sh-client/blob/main/tldr

[4] https://github.com/vn971/rua

Bash https://github.com/raylee/tldr-sh-client

Navi[1] is perfect for this! It's both a fuzzy finder of a personal collection of commands, but it's template syntax is flexible enough to be able to have "command builders"

I have a blog on doing exactly this for a subset of strace[2].

1: https://github.com/denisidoro/navi

2: https://kbknapp.dev/strace-navi/

navi repo add denisidoro/navi-tldr-pages Cloning https://github.com/denisidoro/navi-tldr-pages into /home//.local/share/navi/cheats/tmp... Cloning into '/home//.local/share/navi/cheats/tmp'... remote: Enumerating objects: 1841, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (1841/1841), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1756/1756), done. remote: Total 1841 (delta 83), reused 1839 (delta 83), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (1841/1841), 504.71 KiB | 1.95 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (83/83), done. Hey, listen! navi encountered a problem. Do you think this is a bug? File an issue at https://github.com/denisidoro/navi. Caused by: 0: Failed to import cheatsheets from `denisidoro/navi-tldr-pages` 1: Failed to get cheatsheet files from finder 2: Failed to pass data to finder 3: Unable to prompt cheats to import 4: Broken pipe (os error 32)