Prose style: retire the em-dash habit across comments, docs, and generated text
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- Dominant language
- Go
- Stars
- 9
- Forks
- 0
- Avg merge
- 3h 3m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 509
Description
Owner directive: the " — " construction is overused across this repo's prose. Comments, markdown, commit messages, diagnostics, hover text. The style going forward is to use it very occasionally at most; sentences restructure with parentheses, colons, commas, or a second sentence.
State of the tree: grep -rn " — " docs/ README.md pkg/ cmd/ returns thousands of lines. A single mechanical sweep would churn every file and bury real history, so the retirement is incremental:
- New text: hold the line in review from now on. Recent PRs (#329, #330) already had their added prose scrubbed pre-merge.
- User-facing rendered text first: hover/completion docs the LSP renders, CLI help and
Long:strings, diagnostics. These are product surface, worth deliberate passes. Note one idiom to decide on rather than sweep blindly: the hover heading separator (**name** · type — description) is a consistent format across the whole hover surface; if it changes, it changes everywhere at once, in one reviewed pass. - README and front docs: covered by the README overhaul underway.
- Package docs and comments: opportunistically, whenever a file is edited for real work; no drive-by churn commits.
The one place a dash still earns its keep: a genuine aside that neither parentheses nor a colon carries. Rare by construction.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the named search across docs/, README.md, pkg/, and cmd/, then inspect the LSP hover and completion text, CLI help and Long: strings, and diagnostics. Done is not a repository-wide sweep: it requires an explicitly scoped, reviewed pass over a user-facing surface while preserving the stated exception for genuine asides.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- go
- Domain
- cli, developer-experience, documentation
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100