6 ms·

There's an initialism for it, used by the people who know about the feature to describe the people who didn't: RTFM.

by Kaiyou 6y ago

crazygringo 6y ago
Very funny. If I read the manual for everything I've ever used, I'm not sure I'd have time to actually accomplish anything in the end. Sure, let me spend a day reading through the lists of keyboard/mouse shortcuts for every piece of software I use just to see if there's anything useful in there? No thanks... Good UX would pop up a balloon informing me of the feature after the first time I held down my left-arrow key for more than, say, keypresses.
- tylerl 6y ago
  As someone who actually DOES read the manual for everything, your objection about accomplishing nothing is BS. It's a bit of an upfront investment, but you long term efficiency is dramatically higher. You have time to post comments on HN, you have time to read the damn manual. But as someone who also designs UX, I never design anything that requires instructions. There are plenty of good ways to make things self-explanatory. It's just harder. However, command line UX is different. You can make the basics self explanatory, but you're so limited in your options that exposing the advanced stuff intuitively muddies everything else. So there's a trade-off you have to live with.
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    While technically true, I tend to forget what I read after some time, especially tips and tricks that did not seem that useful when I first read them. So RTFM is not the silver bullet unless you somehow have a system that reminds you to re-read every manual every x months.
- Kaiyou 6y ago
  CLIs are like that. On the bright side, things rarely change. So the stuff you read in the manual 30 years ago still likely works. I prefer it over relearning GUIs with every update. Of course, you might as well disregard the manual and discover things on your own as you need them. Nevertheless, it helps to go at this with a mindset of "this feature surely already exists" lest you're compelled to develop a worse version of the feature yourself.

There's an initialism for it, used by the people who know about the feature to describe the people who didn't: RTFM.

by Kaiyou 6y ago

There's an initialism for it, used by the people who know about the feature to describe the people who didn't: RTFM.

Very funny. If I read the manual for everything I've ever used, I'm not sure I'd have time to actually accomplish anything in the end. Sure, let me spend a day reading through the lists of keyboard/mouse shortcuts for every piece of software I use just to see if there's anything useful in there? No thanks... Good UX would pop up a balloon informing me of the feature after the first time I held down my left-arrow key for more than, say, keypresses.

tylerl 6y ago
As someone who actually DOES read the manual for everything, your objection about accomplishing nothing is BS. It's a bit of an upfront investment, but you long term efficiency is dramatically higher. You have time to post comments on HN, you have time to read the damn manual. But as someone who also designs UX, I never design anything that requires instructions. There are plenty of good ways to make things self-explanatory. It's just harder. However, command line UX is different. You can make the basics self explanatory, but you're so limited in your options that exposing the advanced stuff intuitively muddies everything else. So there's a trade-off you have to live with.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  While technically true, I tend to forget what I read after some time, especially tips and tricks that did not seem that useful when I first read them. So RTFM is not the silver bullet unless you somehow have a system that reminds you to re-read every manual every x months.
Kaiyou 6y ago
CLIs are like that. On the bright side, things rarely change. So the stuff you read in the manual 30 years ago still likely works. I prefer it over relearning GUIs with every update. Of course, you might as well disregard the manual and discover things on your own as you need them. Nevertheless, it helps to go at this with a mindset of "this feature surely already exists" lest you're compelled to develop a worse version of the feature yourself.