Comment by roberthahn

3 days ago

The testing that would be required to support toggles would be for 2^n. I’m not sure that’s a good solution.

8 comments

roberthahn

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wavemode  3 days ago

> The testing that would be required to support toggles would be for 2^n

I don't think that's really true, unless the behavior of each toggle is tightly coupled to the behavior each other toggle.

Case in point - most mature apps nowadays do have hundreds of toggles for various settings and features.

dlcarrier  3 days ago

Makes me wish more apps followed the UNIX model of separating every feature into separate applications with well documented interfaces that only change when new features absolutely require it and otherwise are only updated for security patches.

  • roberthahn  3 days ago

    Yeah I like that idea too. Theres a lot of people who would have trouble with that approach though.

  • AlienRobot  3 days ago

    One common case I notice this is with FFMPEG. Everything that saves a video needs its own dialog with different settings. It would make a lot more sense if you had 1 single polished FFMPEG frontend that everyone just streamed data to.

    On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.

    • mylastattempt  3 days ago

      Me, on the other hand, love ffmpeg, because I notice my ytdlp using it and my vlc player sometimes using it and I have two homemade powrshell scripts using it to convert flac to mp3 and whatever. I don't want to open a program and figure out it's UI for those things. It has a job, it does it well, you can sort of pipe things to it and I'm very happy.

      1 reply →

    • socalgal2  3 days ago

      This is something I like about lots of web apis.

      Want to generate a video, it's just a few lines of code. Want to connect the user's camera (with permission), it's just a few lines of code. Websockets? About 4 lines of code.

      There could be 1000s of options for each of those but they mostly distilled it down to what most people need, and they're cross platform.

    • dlcarrier  3 days ago

      I'm just glad that we have one very polished backend, in FFMPEG itself.

      My favorite frontend is MPV, because I can generally forgo a GUI and just use single keystrokes to do everything.