UX: Program naming and potential searchability difficulty

[thomasrussellmurphy]

What were you trying to do

Discover age as a potential tool to use having heard of it only by formal name or seen in a lightly-commented script file.

What happened

Standalone, age is a simple English word and a notable substring of other words used in package managers. For example, while Macports is currently not a supported package manage for installing age on MacOS, the following searches show how the name is essentially useless for finding the package without necessarily an exact match:

$ port search --name age | grep Found
Found 313 ports.
$ port search age | grep Found
Found 2336 ports.

It would be fairly impractical to sort through these long lists trying to see if age is available without prior knowledge.

Search-confounding words include, but are not limited to: manager, management, language, package, damage, agent, image, message, usage.

Is there a way to improve the naming or searchability of the name of this utility?

[jasperweiss]

I was considering making a macports portfile for age but realised it would be impossible to find. This would have to be fixed first. I could name it "age-encryption" like the website, but it would probably help if the project itself was named as such.

[FiloSottile]

It's true that "age" alone is hard to search, but that's true of a lot of CLI binary names. We are currently the first Google result for "age command line tool" and "age encryption", so I think things worked out ok.