picatz / picatz/flowstate

Prose style: retire the em-dash habit across comments, docs, and generated text

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documentation
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:

  1. New text: hold the line in review from now on. Recent PRs (#329, #330) already had their added prose scrubbed pre-merge.
  2. 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.
  3. README and front docs: covered by the README overhaul underway.
  4. 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

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. 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

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