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by Quekid5 1405 days ago
That text file and your editor is two layers of abstraction (at least, because there's parsing involved, e.g. how to i specify timouts? sizes? Can I use "MiB", "s", "ms", etc?).

The thing we want to optimize for is "how easy is to change a setting". Firefox's "about:" seems like a reasonable approach for expert users.
2 comments
pessimizer 1405 days ago
> how to i specify timouts? sizes? Can I use "MiB", "s", "ms", etc?

These issues neither disappear nor improve when you hide the settings in a mystery binary.

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Quekid5 1405 days ago
I agree, which is why I mentioned the "about:" thing.

It would be nice to have a base level of types that all programs could agree on.

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nequo 1405 days ago
But the abstraction that is the text editor is shared across many programs. You can use your favorite text editor to edit any of the plain-text configs that you need. Firefox’s about: and the way to edit it are specific to Firefox.
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Quekid5 1404 days ago
Well, yes, but we were imagining a world with a sort of universal "about:", I think?

You wouldn't even need that many basic types to cover about 90%+ of the state space. Of course, there would be bonus points if applications could define their own types in a UI-meaningful way.

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