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by aarpmcgee 1086 days ago
I have found that it is pretty difficult to find what I'm looking for when searching for articles/issues that relate in any way to the Next router. "App router" and "pages router" were two of the most ungooglable and generic name they could have chosen. Suddenly it is much more difficult to find what I'm looking for in the ecosystem.
2 comments
leerob 1086 days ago
Sorry about this. I work on the documentation (author of the post). Are you talking about searching through the docs or searching through GitHub? ARe there specific things you've searched for you couldn't find?
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aarpmcgee 1086 days ago
It has been primarily related to web search and Github. It has been a month or two since I last tried the Next.js app router and I don't remember specifics, but I do recall that my workflow often involved searching for an issue, article, or guide related to how to accomplish something or fix something in relation to the router, but with the distinction between routing mechanisms being represented by these relatively generic nouns (app/pages), I found it difficult/cumbersome to identify if the information I was looking at was pertinent to the routing mechanism I was using. I wouldn't be surprised if the situation has improved by now.

I'd also like to mention that I regret my uncharitable phrasing in my original comment "…the most ungooglable and generic name they could have chosen…". While I do think more specific names might have helped in some ways, I can appreciate the difficulty in coming up with names for this kind of thing.

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Clamchop 1085 days ago
Naming things is hard. On the one hand, I prefer descriptive names like app router. On the other, idiosyncratic names like, idk, Pinecone are more googleable but opaque and hard to remember sometimes.

I used the CSS toolkit called Less and that name took the worst out of each hand. That was just terrible re: searching for things.

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throwaway675309 1085 days ago
Agreed, nextJS feels incredibly overloaded with lots of terms that seem to conflate.

I tried to use the new app router, but it felt infuriatingly opaque to me, so I just went back to pages. Fortunately you can use the newest nextJS v13 and still have access to the old Pages system.

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