this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Programming

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Do you actually read documentation, or just search it when you’re stuck? (programming.dev)
submitted 6 days ago by CoderSupreme@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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I’ve been switching from Vim to Helix recently. I did the built-in tutor, and whenever I need to configure something, I look it up in the docs. The problem is, I only find what I already know to look for. Without reading the documentation more broadly, I don’t really know what I can configure in the first place.

So I’m curious, do you sit down and read documentation to understand a tool, or do you just search it when you hit a specific problem?

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[–] arty@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago

If I know that’s a tool I will use a lot, I will try to read its documentation. I’ll just look up the basic info for basic tasks otherwise.

Reminds me how times ago I would install a new GUI application and then would just go through every menu, every setting, every dialog it had. This was much quicker than documentation and still gave me an outline of what’s possible.