Pointing at the error: compiler-style diagnostics in uutils coreutils

22 points by mpweiher

eta

Is it just me who finds this kind of diagnostic slightly overkill? I think for compilers it makes a lot of sense since the inputs are big text files, but getting 5 lines of diagnostic splat for 1 line of shell input is almost harder to read for me.

Diana

Well then you can use the never flag

But the thing is, it is a helpful thing for people that learn. I know for me it is not only better. Before i could hardly understand the error message.
sloane

unix command lines get painfully dense, and can be hard to follow even if you’re writing them yourself.

i could also see this being useful in the case where you copy and paste a command line from someone else, eg, you paste a command line that uses BSD style flags or somesuch and don’t realize why it’s broken.

zesterer

Oh, neat! I did not expect ariadne to make it to places like this.

Fwiw, if the author sees this, ariadne also has a 'compact' mode which might be a better default for uutils: less padding space.

gignico

Are there Rust crates helping with the rendering of these messages, or each tool is on its own? It may help with a tool I’m writing.

zesterer

My diagnostics crate, ariadne, is being used here: https://codeberg.org/zesterer/ariadne/
- gignico
  
  Wow both ariadne and chumski look amazing!
jak2k

I use miette in combination with thiserror. This means the only thing I have to do is adding #[derive(Error, Diagnostic)] to my error enums and using miette::Result.

stephank

Would be rad if it could point at your actual command input, instead of duplicating the command in its own output. But I imagine that's probably super tricky. :)

zesterer

That would certainly need shell integration. Which would be neat, but not very unixey.

evmar

Does anyone know why these kinds of tools often include colored strings like "help:" or "hint:" in their output? I get that there is some internal representation that might match that, but isn't all the output help and hints? What is the purpose of the label?

Diana
From a user pov, no. This is not help. It is the opposite. It is one of multiple things
1. The computer asking my help to understand what I wrote because it is bad at understanding complex communication
2. More work for me to understand the computer model and adapt to it
3. A pain because things do not work as I wanted. 4... I could keep going
As such, the "help" hint is a help into "how to get out of this pothole". The rest is "oh no, you are stuck in a pothole" from an emotional pov for the user.
- evmar
  
  The first example in the post has "did you mean 'b-y'?" followed by "Help: a range goes from the lower character to the higher one, as in a-z"
  
  It feels like quite a subtle difference to think of one as help and one as not, and in particular my question is why label the second in this manner.