autodetect if it has been installed correct

[neoneye]

There are already some github issues about this. #34 #76

I installed tere on macOS with brew install tere. Then I run tere immediately and it starts, great. However when I Esc'ape tere, the current dir doesn't get updated, I spend some time on investigating what is wrong.

I had to update my .zshrc.

Please make tere do a health-check if it was installed correctly, and guide the user how to fix it.

[mgunyho]

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

To improve the setup experience, I would like to know: how did you find out about tere? Did you install it following the instructions in the README? If so, how do you think the instructions could be clarified so that people don't miss the step about the shell configuration? Or did you see tere in a blog post or similar, and directly brew installed it?

I'll try to see if it's possible to automatically detect if tere is correctly installed, but I'm afraid that it cannot work in general. I can't think of a way to find out if tere is run via an alias, in a way that works for all different shells, including CMD and Powershell. And it's not really clear how I would even define being "installed", as for example tere could be run within another program. How would tere know when to warn the user about the shell config?

[neoneye]

I learned about tere in my github feed. One of the people that I follow had starred tere.

I can't recall what I was thinking when seeing the readme. I guess I was frustrated by the big size of the install instructions, so I thought that must be if you are to compile it from scratch. What popped out was the brew install tere text, and I just went with that, without ever seeing the step 2.

Alternatively shorten the Setup instructions by removing the Configure your shell section, and instead have tere show this text on first launch.

Kludgy health check idea:

• Pass an i'm installed parameter from the shell to tere. So when running the tere shell command, then it invokes tere --shell. This way tere knows that it has been spawned correctly.
• If no --shell argument is provided, then tere knows that it has been invoked manually and that it's probably not the intended way, maybe show install instructions here.

Your tere tool is awesome. I'm a fan.

[mgunyho]

That's a fair point that the setup instructions in the README are a bit verbose, I'll try to work on it a bit.

The --shell option could work, although it would then require existing users to update their configs (maybe an argument in favor of https://github.com/mgunyho/tere/issues/46).

Another option I thought of was to look for a file in .cache/tere/ which would tell us if we're running for the first time or not, although this would be slightly more magical.

[mgunyho]

I have now improved this as of version eef493b8e798896bb16064897884390109b305d9:

• I added sub-headings for each step in the setup instructions, so that the main message of each step is more clear. I also made the explanations a bit shorter and more to the point.
• If the app is being run for the first time (i.e., the history.json file doesn't exist), the user is prompted to confirm that they have updated their shell config. This doesn't really check if the shell config is actually correct, but I think it should work quite well.

Hopefully with these changes, this kind of confusion happens less in the future.

[neoneye]

Excellent with the check for history.json. I like that.

Thank you for creating this awesome tool.