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[welcome] Add “install shell commands” entry in welcome guide on macOS #1623

Description

@savetheclocktower

Have you checked for existing feature requests?

  • Completed

Summary

On macOS, we don't install a pulsar CLI tool into the user's PATH until they invoke “Install Shell Commands” from the application menu. A user mentioned that they'd forgotten about this item and asked if it was mentioned on the welcome screen. It isn't — but it ought to be!

What benefits does this feature provide?

Alerts the user to an important onboarding task, making it less likely that it will be forgotten.

Any alternatives?

If we wanted stronger assurances that a user would remember to install shell commands, we could try something more aggressive, like automatically checking if Pulsar is within the user's PATH and offering to add it if it's missing.

If we did this, we'd have to be careful about it. It is a legitimate choice not to want to install a pulsar command, so if we explicitly ask the user we should distinguish between “no, and never ask again” and “no, but you can ask me later.”

We'd also need to wait to perform this check until after the editor has discovered the user's typical PATH. By definition, if the user hasn't installed shell commands yet, they are launching via a method that does not automatically inherit environment variables from any shell, so it triggers the code path in which we try to figure out the user's default shell so we can launch it and derive a PATH that way.

All that can be figured out later, though; and this is a good stopgap in the meantime.

Other examples:

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