> My personal practice when writing command line utiities for macOS is to use the macOS API to write settings (previously known as “preferences”) into ~/Library/Preferences
This would mean that essentially all edits to the configuration must be performed by the CLI tool itself? Because macOS preferences aren't really intended to be edited directly by the user. That feels like a totally different category of configuration than what we're discussing here. Though it certainly provides some nice functionality.
Yes, ideally the tool should edit its own preferences. A quick and dirty tool might leave the user to run the macOS "defaults" command line utility themselves. It’s certainly no worse than looking up the dotfile format and firing up vi.
In what world is this user hostile behavior ideal? There is no way you can write a cli tool that is more ergonomic in editing plain-texty config format than a good code editor!
> It’s certainly no worse
It's much worse, you don't get persistent undo from previous edits, indication of current changed and committed data, syntax highlighting, regex search, etc, etc.
> It’s certainly no worse than looking up the dotfile format and firing up vi
It's a lot worse, IMO. We're all fluent in our text editor of choice, we all know the rough format conventions of dot files.
Whereas I'd certainly have to lookup man page of the defaults tool, and IIRC it only supports editing one-key-at-a-time, which sucks for a dense config file.
If your tool provides a TUI/GUI for editing preferences, that'd be a different story.
Yeah nah. If your configuration has a schema (e.g. JSON schema), AI tools can do a magnificent job turning free-form requests in natural language to valid configuration. Even if your configuration does not have a schema, people can refer to snippets of configuration made by other people on the internet.
Don't force your users to go through some custom sequence of CLI commands that they first have to spend 5 minutes learning. There should be no learning curve for a one-time setup.
This would mean that essentially all edits to the configuration must be performed by the CLI tool itself? Because macOS preferences aren't really intended to be edited directly by the user. That feels like a totally different category of configuration than what we're discussing here. Though it certainly provides some nice functionality.