Enable discussions for this repo

[argenkiwi]

Hi @rvaiya. I hope you are well. I just wanted to suggest you enable GitHub Discussions for this repo in order to provide a space for questions, comments and suggestions while keeping issues for actual bugs that may emerge. Hopefully it will make things easier for you too. Thanks!

[rvaiya]

I agree that there is too much noise in the issue tracker (e.g basic usage questions), but I am not convinced using another proprietary github feature (which is essentially just issues in another tab) will solve the problem.

I suspect part of the solution is better documentation, which I have admittedly not invested as much time in as I should. My intention has been to flesh out the FAQ (I have already tagged several issues with the label faq) and possibly create a curated markdown wiki. Useful feature requests and bugs are probably still within the province of the issue tracker, though there is room for better moderation.

[argenkiwi]

Completely up to you. I have been using Discussions in other repos and I have found them useful to share ideas and ask questions. I don't think having a great Wiki and FAQ will be enough to stop people from mis-using the issue tracker, but even if it did, it comes at a much greater cost than enabling this feature and allowing the community to fill the gap. But I'll leave it to you to decide how much harm there would be on turning the feature on and seeing what happens.

[srfsh]

I feel the concerns regarding Github being a proprietary platform, but there's a value in keeping the questions separate from the issue tracker. Even though it is proprietary it allows public viewing unlike how projects use Discord for questions (such as Typst until recently).

[lobre]

What is complicated is that it is easy to open an issue (or even a discussion) while it is way harder and requires manpower to close one. Most of the time, I found that the manpage of keyd is of high quality and contains pretty much everything needed, apart from when you have complex behaviour that you are trying to implement.

I have myself created a few issues regarding the desire to achieve a certain behaviour, thinking that keyd was missing some features. Most of the time, the constraint I saw was acknowledged, but suggestions were made with a different solution, sometimes less elegant than what I envisioned, but also sometimes smarter.

A FAQ would for sure be useful. But I wonder if there could also be a set of examples showing how to implement common behaviours. And this set of examples could grow over time. For beginners, taking inspiration from examples that resemble what we want to achieve is very useful. And I feel that we can tend toward a list of examples that cover 99% of what people usually want to do. There could also be more complex examples that combine different principles and that could serve as recipes to achieve x or y.

I personally started to feel overwhelmed by Discord servers. There are more and more of them, and they force live interactions. This seems cool at first (because they contribute socially to the building of a community), but I believe they are less efficient. For some of them that I follow regularly, I have seen the same questions asked over and over again, and they were answered each time while a common reference would have been less time-consuming for everybody and less noisy. I think that bringing back asynchronous communication nowadays is important in regard to all those distracting environments.

[rvaiya]

but even if it did, it comes at a much greater cost than enabling this feature and allowing the community to fill the gap.

I am open to reconsidering it, but I think better documentation is probably the first port of call.

A FAQ would for sure be useful. But I wonder if there could also be a set of examples showing how to implement common behaviours.

The two are not mutually exclusive. By 'FAQ', I mean answering questions like 'How do I achieve X?'. The issue tracker is full of people asking basic usage questions like this.

And this set of examples could grow over time. For beginners, taking inspiration from examples that resemble what we want to achieve is very useful. And I feel that we can tend toward a list of examples that cover 99% of what people usually want to do. There could also be more complex examples that combine different principles and that could serve as recipes to achieve x or y.

Yes, this is a sensible approach. Most of this knowledge already exists in some form on the issue tracker, it just needs to be distilled. I will put some time into this in the next few days. People can then submit PRs to fill in the gaps.

I personally started to feel overwhelmed by Discord servers.
[...]

Agreed. I have no plans to create one.