> FWIW, I do appreciate you engaging in a longer more nuanced conversation. Even if we continue to disagree I appreciate this and wish more long conversations would happen on HN.

Same! I really feel like HN should have like a "branch topic" or "move to DM" or something. Is that email (I'm on a big "everything is email/NNTP" thing lately haha)?

> This is why burntsushi's argument is not meaningful to me and has no potential to sway me, because it is not addressing the argument I'm making. My argument is that when you are doing failure analysis that you have to look at the different ways things can fail.

Well I think he did this at least as much as you have. If there were some kind of usage study or telemetry on how many times people run rg and then run rg -uuu I guess we'd have something approaching good data on this, but I don't think we do. In the absence of that, it seems like we just have a couple of different viewpoints on ripgrep UX, neither more objective or correct than the other. That doesn't make them invalid, it just means neither is measurably wrong. You might point to IDK, GitHub issues or something, but silent majority and all that.

> This has everything to do with modes of failure.

Ooh I think the miscommunication here is when you say "failure". It's not a failure that ripgrep honors .gitignore. It would be if it advertised that it honors .gitignore, but then scanned everything you listed to ignore--that would be a bug. Maybe your issue with these tools is that the names of them shadow their coreutils counterparts, but don't aspire to be drop-in replacements and have significantly different UX? I can understand that. IMO "grep" is both the very specific tool and behavior of grep, but also a generic "look for something in the contents of things" verb. Like, I'd be with you if ripgrep were "ripawk" or whatever, but I think grep has a certain broad abstract meaning at this point. But yeah, fuzzy.

> Too much output is annoying but is highly unlikely to be catastrophic (especially if our prior is grep).

Well, grep is really parsimonious by default. I don't worry about putting it in systems where output ends up in log files. I really dislike the modern trend of being maximally verbose by default; IMO that's what -v and -vv and -vvvvvv are for. I get pretty annoyed having to pipe output through grep, and the nuclear irony of piping grep output also through grep would probably destroy me.

> I think you misread. I didn't alias fd to find, I aliased fd to fd.

Oh yeah that's what I meant. Whenever I have stuff that has annoying CLI args I build aliases or functions in my shell config, so like:

alias cgrep=grep --exclude=.git --exclude=.gitignore --exclude=.node_modules --exclude=frontend_build

That way I still have regular grep hanging around, but when I'm grepping in my source code folders I just use cgrep (actually I think it was pgrep because of where I was working, which is also a little easier to type). Maybe it's a little imperfect, but engineering is the religious practice of celebrating imperfection.

> it is super-linear because of this communication that doesn't have to be explicitly stated

Oh I'm 100% with you on this one. Vim has a mental model where once you gain the tiniest bit of fluency you just take off. At this point I can rarely even tell you what commands I'm inputting, or like when things go wrong it's like I tripped over my tongue or stuttered or something haha. I think tools that show you a way of thinking (Lisp is another) are amazing. And moreover, I think they create _culture_. Getting trapped in Vim (or emacs... it doesn't even tell you how to get out!) is cultural, rm -rf'ing / is cultural, reading tons of man pages is cultural, dd -of'ing the wrong device is cultural, and you take different things away from those experiences. I learned that when you're using dd you're in "I'm not fucking around I will destroy everything" mode, and also that that mode exists--in contrast to more gentle or verbose CLI/TUI/GUI tools, and I learned to appreciate both (love dd, love OpenBSD's wizard installer). It also made me realize you can create culture through your work, choosing which values and aesthetics to showcase or mental models to build a tool/app/platform around. In the same way every act is a political act, they're all also cultural, and by necessity spiritual. When I build I put something of my spirit into it, not something ineffable like a soul or whatever, but the culmination of my experience, taste and ethos.

Maybe that's why engineers get into super heated arguments over the tiniest of things. They're not tiny to us! We feel them deeply.

> Personally I abhor the idea of "don't document, make your code self documenting."

Yeah Hillel Wayne had a great post about it [0]. I've been very anti comment a lot of my career, but I've been turned around. I can feel my brain start to sag when I think of a page of code full of huge identifiers like remoteControlWithSendOffExemptionEnabled or wtfever.

> It's not about "no manual" but maximize the amount of information the user gets "for free".

I personally don't love little helper affordances or overly verbose output. TFA has the perfect example of Helix showing possible commands as you input, because that would drive me absolutely bonkers. My fingers speak Vim the language, and when I speak English I don't have a box in the bottom right corner of my sight that tells me how the rest of my sentence might go. It's an entirely different part of my brain; it's non-visual.

I don't want to be bombarded by information. I want the bare minimum to convey your point. My mind is already full of incredible amounts of junk and I am often struggling to marshal enough mental resources to do reasonably good work. If I need more information, I'm capable of asking for it. I'll write a tool myself if I have to.

I do think there's a tension here between like, someone learning Vim and someone having used Vim for years. A feature like this is maybe really helpful for the former (I'm not super sure, it could end up being kind of a crutch, who knows). Maybe a useful way to put this is I don't want to start from a super loud "wall of sound" information environment. I want to start from silence and turn it up to where I'm comfortable. I want to adjust the mix or EQ different things to raise or lower them. I want to be able to configure different scenes where sometimes I'm very concerned about what things look like in memory, whereas others I'm very interested in the call graph, but I never want to see the call graph when I'm examining the memory because I want to focus on the memory.

There's a value here of respecting a user's focus and attention that I feel like isn't getting enough play. My strong feeling is don't try to give me information unless I've specifically asked for it. Don't anticipate. Assume I know what I'm doing (at least, allow me that illusion haha).

[0]: https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/why-not-comments/