### ----------------------------------------------------
### -- App::Rak
### -- Licenses: Artistic-2.0
### -- Authors: Elizabeth Mattijsen
### -- File: resources/help/philosophy.txt
### ----------------------------------------------------
Philosophy:
‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒

The philosophy of "rak" came from having a personal itch for having
"ack" on a newly installed machine, but not wanting to fetch that
from CPAN because, well, it is Perl and I want to move away from it.

And I missed a number of features in "ack", most notably the
ability to use a search result as direct pointers to places in
files to edit.  That is now supplied with the --edit option in
"rak".

The other thing I missed, was the ability to use Raku regexes
as patterns to search, which is now possible.

I also always get confused with the myriad of options that you can
specify with programs such as "grep", "ack" or "ag".  And "rak" is
no different in that sense.  But each option only has a single
"long" spelling, so that should reduce the cognitive load a bit
(although maybe not the typing part).  Fortunately, you can create
your *own* shortcuts of often used options with --save!

The name "rak" developed from "rack", as in: Raku version of
"ack".  I decided to drop the "c" to make it more Raku like.
As it turns out, "rak" in Dutch means a straight part of a
river.  Which feels oddly appropriate, trying to get to the
heart of things directly.

At the current stage of development of "rak", it is still
mainly geared towards my personal itch, although several
people have already expressed interest in using it also.

Performance is important, but does not currently have a
strong focus in development: it is more important to get
things working in a way that is workable for me, and other
explorers of this new tool.

Elizabeth Mattijsen


