minor CLI "Next steps" UX improvement

[stephanietuerk]

I noticed that in using the CLI to set up a new project, the "Next steps..." box gives the user some instructions that may trip up someone who is very very new to using the command line. Namely, the instructions tell a user to cd to what they entered as a rootPath, but that rotPath variable includes './' at the front of it which a users doesn't actually want to include if they cd into that directory.

Obviously anyone experienced with the command line can figure out what to do, but given that this product is aimed at users with a very wide range of skillsets (and that you're clearly trying to make the CLI feel nice for people!), it seems like this could potentially trip someone up.

[mbostock]

I guess this is a Windows-specific issue? On POSIX systems (namely macOS and Linux), it’s certainly valid to

cd ./hello-framework

and equivalent to

cd hello-framework

Or is this just an aesthetic issue where seeing the leading ./ introduces the question of what it means?

[mbostock]

Thanks for the suggestion! I think it makes sense to remove the ./ since we don’t need it on POSIX, and it’s actively unhelpful on Windows, so I’ve removed it in #1135. 🙏

[stephanietuerk]

Yup, seems like it's Windows specific. :) Thanks!

[mbostock]

Thank you! We’re working to overcome our POSIX assumptions and appreciate the feedback. 😅

[stephanietuerk]

UPDATE:
I just tested this pretty thoroughly across all three Windows terminals -- bash (linux), PowerShell, and Command Prompt, and I could not reproduce. (It seemed strange to me that a path to create the directory wouldn't work to change into it and I was curious).

It IS true however that PowerShell uses .\ instead of ./, which is what I thought the problem was initially when you mentioned Windows. But in my testing of this, if I left the directory as ./hello-framework, and then did cd ./hello-framework, even with PowerShell I could still get there. (And the dir was created as a subdirectory of my current dir.)

Apologies for the false alarm here. My guess is that perhaps I typed something wrong in specifying the new repo location -- originally I got an error message when trying to cd. (Screenshot above was from my second time).

Since you are interested in the Windows UX though, I'll share that if I typed something wrong, it may be due to the fact that it took me a long time to figure out how to delete the suggested "./hello-framework" under "Where to create your framework?" Neither the delete nor the arrow keys had any effect in trying to modify that text and in fact I actually quit the CLI the first time because I couldn't figure it out. I finally did figure out that I could type over top of it, but this was non-obvious because on my Windows machine (in all of the three terminals in VSCode) that text appears as solid white. When I tried this on a Mac (zsh and bash in VSCode), the text had reduced opacity/was gray, which is what I am used to for "suggested but non-mandatory" text in the command line.

In any case, given that I couldn't reproduce, I'm fine with this issue being closed. Hope the Windows info can be helpful though!