Lana! On making NPM scripts great again.

Rafał Pastuszak
Storienteer Devlog
Published in
2 min readMar 9, 2017
Powered by Lana and the tasteful and mysterious Adventure Time colour scheme.

What?

Lana! (link here) provides a more user-friendly way of browsing and running NPM scripts in your projects:

Also, it makes managing your documentation easier by pulling out descriptions from your README file.

Adding descriptions to your NPM tasks should be as simple as letting Lana read your documentation by placing a comment in a related section of your README.md file. Check the docs for details.

Maintaining documentation is a pain and ideally it should be reduced to minimum. Yes, I hate it and I believe in most cases documentation should not exist.

That’s why next time you run Lana, it’ll pick correct description and replace (often obscure) *sh source with it.

Why?

My typical workflow

In my work, I tend to switch between dozens of projects on a daily basis, often relying on package.json to look up the dev tasks, testing workflow, maintenance tasks, et cetera, et cetera. They come from different clients, colleagues and sometimes — a younger version of me (a really annoying guy relying on bizarre tools and naming conventions, like CoffeeScript, which is so 2011).

And, like everyone else, I suck at multitasking.

If any of this sounds familiar, give Lana! a try. Your OCD will thank you.

If you liked this article, you might enjoy Design Verbs, Not Nouns, where I’ll try to convince you that your next project should be small, simple and ridiculous, like Fluttershy.

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Rafał Pastuszak
Storienteer Devlog

Writing about tech, photography and rainbows like it’s 1998 · Sometimes speaks Persian in sleep.