[Monotone-devel] Fwd: Re: Monotone - A couple quick notes

[Thomas Keller]

FYI - to keep the discussion on the list.

@Richard: I noted your reply and agree completly. Post-1.0 and
shrinked-down "view" that only notes the most important stuff, while
leaving other things for --full or --complete.

Thomas.

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: Re: Monotone - A couple quick notes
Datum: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:10:39 -0800
Von: John B Thiel <address@hidden>
An: Thomas Keller <address@hidden>

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 1:41 AM, Thomas Keller <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am 24.02.2011 03:35, schrieb John B Thiel:
>>
>> Another thing that might be helpful is grouping/highlighting the basic
>> subset of most frequently used commands.  Generally with these systems
>> you use the same basic 5-10 commands 80+% of the time, with the rest
>> for special cases, but it's always some work to initially find those
>> 10.
>
> What would you propose here? I could only think of printing "often" used
> commands in bold (or somehow colored) in the output of `mtn help`. We
> started a "colorization" branch some time ago for the purpose of making
> the output of diff, log and friends easier to grasp, but I fear this
> won't get ready until 1.1, because Windows support for this is still
> largely lacking.
>

Conceptually, to me the bare minimum of VC is bringing content into
the repository, at which point I could safely delete the source, and
re-create it.

So maybe at the top or bottom you can have a group like 'BASICS',
'Getting Started', or 'Most Used'.

Rather than highlighting, which might be confusing (and not widely
supported in terminals), this group would duplicate commands from the
other groups - specifically, for the input side:

create db
setup/register a subdir (workspace)
add files
checkin
commit
merge
etc

and for output:

co, checkout, list
etc

Basically, the "top 10" commands you all use most of the time, plus
whatever setup, and list/status commands are needed to get going.


Also, by the way, in the main help screen, if the 3 sentences at the
end were tightened up or moved to the top, then more of the commands
would stay on-screen, in a small window.

Also, I think most of the help screen phrases "Commands that do xxx"
don't really add much, while taking lots of space. It could just say:

Command groups:

database                (db, local)
tree                    (checkout, co, conflicts, ...)
workspace               (add, attr, ci, commit, ...)

etc

===

Thanks for the good notes on the branch collision issues, and I
generally agree with your conservative approach.

-- jbthiel

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