Yes they are wrong. A contribution may consist of “merely” a bug report. Even just asking questions may indicate that the UX or documentation is lacking.

No? This will search the logfiles (if irssi is configured to create those at all) for a pattern. This still requires that you had to have an irssi client running and connected to the server/channel in question, during the time the user is afk. Which is why others recommend e.g. setting up ZNC.

There are also mutt and neomutt.

I personally have been using the latter for years, but it requires some time to setup and tweak until it fits your purposes.

Documentation is top-notch though, and customizability a first-class concern.

I used tmsu (“tag my shit up”) for a while, but it required too much discipline and then I dropped it.

In addition, tools like fzf for fuzzy file-search (comes with shell integration to e.g. replace the default history search in bash) and ripgrep-all made this kind of organization unnecessary for me. It now suffices to have a vague idea where a thing is located and I can do a brute-force search in a few seconds.

The next-level filesystem argument is brought forward every few months, but I’m not buying it.

and then suddenly there’s the perfect use case

Yeah but like WHAT?

Just so that you have an additional data point, here’s how I do it.

I run a backup first, using borg-backup. I used rsync in the past, then rsnapshot and now borg since it allows for compressed incremental backups, diffing on the “chunk” level, meaning I won’t backup the entirety of a modified file again and safe a lot of space.

I used yay before, but like you I didn’t want to go into it blindly and do some modicum of sanity-checking the PKGBUILD for changes beforehand. Since it wasn’t obvious on what would be the best way of using yay for doing this, I asked around on the ArchLinux Forum, and ultimately decided to try one of the simpler tools suggested in the Arch Wiki, aurutils.

After setting it up (the author helped me migrate), I now use it as follows:

• aur repo --upgrades: Searches for new versions of aur packages and displays them
• aur sync --upgrades --no-build: Performs a git-pull under ~/.cache/aurutils/sync and opens vifm so that I can look at a diff of the PKGBUILD and all the other changes in the affected directory.
• aur sync --upgrades --no-view: Builds the package. It is now available as part of the custom (local) repository used only for aur packages, but hasn’t been upgraded yet. That is, a package.tar.gz or whatever has been created and put into ~/.cache/aurutils/sync/, where the PKGBUILD resides as well
• sudo pacman -Syu: Upgrades all packages from all repositories, including the ones from the custom repository

I won’t argue pro or against one aur helper or the other, but I feel like I have a little more insight about what happens under the hood since I made the switch. That being said, in the very beginning, I managed aur packages manually. This works also, but at some point became too tedious for my taste. I am happy with the semi-automatic approach I am using now.

I think you generally can’t know if someone shared their code with the intention that others may use it, but it’s a reasonable assumption.

I find this unnecessarily derisive. There are good reasons for a UI or README not being user-friendly, the top-most one being (imo) that it is really, really hard to get right, takes a lot of time and doesn’t primarily solve the problem the project was started for.