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Swap default behavior of "view" actions to display in terminal instead of web #555
Description
Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve
There are widely varying preferences for where people would like to view an issue, PR, repo, etc., but as we've been digesting feedback we think that more people would benefit from the default view behavior being to view the object right in the terminal as opposed to being taken to the browser. We still think it should be simple to view in the browser as we know an easy handoff there is an important piece of many people's workflow.
Proposed solution
We discussed swapping the default behavior of view actions to display in the CLI, which is the current functionality of the --preview flag. As we get further along in terms of what you're able to see in the terminal itself, this will become even nicer.
In order to also accommodate easily viewing in browser, we're suggesting a flag on view actions for --web, that allows people to view the specified object in the browser.
Additional context
There are several places across the app where view actions do this (issue, pr, repo), so we'll just need to be thorough here.
This may require a bit of documentation change anywhere we've shown view taking people to the browser by default.
Activity
billygriffin commentedon Mar 9, 2020
We discussed this quite a bit today, and we were going back and forth, and I wanted to memorialize where we ended up for now, with the obvious caveat that this could change as we continue to learn more.
We were concerned about whether we might be harming the experience for a nontrivial number of people by swapping the default for all the view commands to view in the terminal instead of in the browser.
However, given that this is a CLI tool, all else equal we think it's reasonable to bias defaults toward keeping people in the context of the terminal, so that seems like a better default than viewing in the browser. This will be partially mitigated by the
--webflag that will allow people to easily retain the current behavior, along with upcoming alias support in #294 that will allow people to alias the--webversion of these commands to something shorter and simpler.