So, geany has an ok-documentation. I could find useful things in various areas - homepage, wiki, and so forth. Some of it is a bit outdated; for instance on the wiki I remember I first saw an article written by enrico some 6 years ago. I remember enrico from having started geany. Different folks came and some stayed, some went away.
I believe documentation is very, very important. Nowadays google search sucks, and finding up to date documentation is hard, so I think all projects should try to strive to make documentation as good as possible. But most developers first write the code; documentation is often an afterthought. It takes time too, and when time is limited, people opt for other things often enough in open source projects. Now people may say "ideally all should be self-explanatory or built in geany itself" and while I agree that this is useful and should be done, not everything can be stored in the IDE itself. Some things are also things that could perhaps be changed. For instance, I would like to change the individual colours of syntax-elements recognized by geany, but without having to create a new template file. I'd like to use geany itself to change itself. Is this possible right now? Probably not. I can also spend some time to do so, but here also time kicks in, so ... things may be slow to progress here. This can perhaps be changed differently, for instance, specify all colourizable tokens and use CSS to style it. That would be easier and work across many projects. But this here is just an example; the point is that I think ideally we could improve the documentation for geany as much as that is possible. I have no really good strategy or suggestion for this. Perhaps the simplest one is to accept the status quo how it is (not perfect), but to make some changes to contributions and additions. For instance, any new pull request should ideally follow a template that also describes the change itself, and stores it somewhere too. Perhaps we could automatically sync onto the wiki too and keep things updated that way? I am not too familiar with github wikis, but I know from some other projects that they do that. Perhaps we can also have a logical 1:1 structure for every aspect of geany. Ideally making it searchable too. The wiki here may be useful as a first entry point but I think if only a few people can edit it, then it will get out of date quickly. Is there some way to encourage easier contribution? For documentation I feel it should be made easier to contribute too. Anyway these are just some semi-random thoughts. My hope is that in, say, 5 years we have improved the documentation of geany a LOT. That way new users can also find things more easily; and old users too, who forgot something. -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/geany/geany/discussions/4542 You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Message ID: <geany/geany/repo-discussions/[email protected]>
