I think this comment/discussion ends up over-emphasizing the 'strangeness' of the line-number situation with this library, the page linked ends with: 'This position is subject to discuss. Also it doesn’t stop anyone from forking the code and maintaining line-numbers implementation separately.', which seems pretty reasonable to me!
Yeah, this is pretty much the behavior that I want to see from open source maintainers: make decisions and build conventions but be open to having your mind convinced of alternatives.
I already like this one better, to be honest. It also already has Julia and Rust support. If it were to include Elixir support as well, it'd be perfect.
Laser pointers don't work if the video is being recorded or screencast at the same time. They only work when the viewer is in the same room, and even then, they are typically pretty poor.
Out of several dozen different uses of laser pointers, I've only ever been able to (easily) see perhaps 3 or 4 of them, plus another small portion if focusing entirely on the game of spot-the-laser-pointer. It's related to my colourblindness.
As such, verbal cues (or a long stick) are preferable to a laser pointer. Of course, use a laser pointer to assist those who can see it, but it's better assume half the people in the room can't and use words to this effect.
It does seem more appropriate to have a separate module for line numbers. I would definitely understand the separation of concerns argument, but the maintainer instead makes some sort of emotional appeal about clutter and simplicity to explain why there is no line number support.
> the maintainer instead makes some sort of emotional appeal about clutter and simplicity to explain why there is no line number support
Clutter and simplicity is not an emotional argument. It becomes verifiably more difficult to maintain a code base with each new line. And since he's the one doing the maintaining, his position seems quite reasonable.
Secondly, he seems to have a strong aesthetic aversion to line numbers, and I can totally respect that. Frankly, among popular open source projects, those whose developers have the strongest sense of style and design and usually (not always) the best.
Many popular syntax highlighting libraries do include this functionality. For example, the popular Python syntax highlighter "Pygments" supports line numbers[0].
I understand the author's point-of-view on this, but disabling line numbers sounds like something that should be user-controllable. Right now it feels like a misfeature, whereas "we don't implement line numbers by default, but if you want them, do this and that and you can have them" would feel way more like a good feature to have.