Adding a best practices guide.

docs/input/best-practices.md

@@ -0,0 +1,118 @@
+Title: Best Practices
+Order: 21
+Description: Best practices when working with Spectre.Console and how to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
+---
+
+Spectre.Console works hard to make writing console applications easier for developers.
+It is designed to be easy to use and to be flexible, but there are some things that can be a bit tricky.
+
+## Output
+
+Spectre.Console has a number of output methods and functions, but they rely on the user's console to render.
+
+Many things make up what a console can render.
+
+* It's output encoding.
+* The console font.
+* The size of the windows.
+* The codepage.
+* The terminal itself.
+* The console's background color.
+
+Many of these items can be auto-detected by Spectre.Console.
+Some of these items can only be configured by the user and cannot be detected automatically.
+
+Spectre.Console can detect the following items:
+
+* Output encoding: the built-in widgets will use the encoding that is detected to fallback when needed when UTF-8 is not
+  detected e.g. if a `Table` is configured to use a rounded border, but a
+  user's output encoding does not support the extended ASCII characters then a fallback set of characters will be used.
+* Size of the windows: at the time of writing to the screen, Spectre.Console will know the number of characters when
+  writing full-width widths.
+* Most terminals: Spectre.Console will try to detect the running Console and match
+  their [capabilities](xref:T:Spectre.Console.Capabilities).
+
+Things that cannot be detected automatically:
+
+* Console font: Spectre.Console will assume a relatively modern and fixed width font. If a user's console font is not
+  fixed width, then the output for some items such as `Table` will be incorrect.
+  The supported characters can also vary between fonts, especially with some modern features like Powerline characters
+  and NerdFonts.
+* The background color and configured foreground colors.
+
+### Output Best Practices
+
+**Do** test your application in multiple terminals. On Windows machines, the built-in `cmd.exe` and `Windows Terminal`
+both work well for a variety of capabilities.
+
+**Do not** hard-code emojis and extended unicode characters in your code as default output strings.
+There is no guarantee that the user's console will support them and Spectre.Console will not be able to fall back
+automatically.
+To ensure the widest level of support for various terminals, allow users to either opt in to the use of extended unicode
+characters or, depending on the type of application,
+allow the user to customize the output and configure those characters by hand.
+
+**Do not** assume a user's background color is black.
+It can be any color, including white.
+While Spectre.Console allows you to use up to 24-bit colors, don't assume they'll look good when displayed on the user's
+console. If you stick to the standard 16 ANSI colors,
+Spectre.Console will tell your terminal to use the color that is configured in the user's terminal theme.
+If you are using an 8 or 24-bit color for the foreground text, it is recommended that you also set an appropriate
+background color to match.
+
+### Live-Rendering Best Practices
+
+Spectre.Console has a variety of [live-rendering capabilities](live) widgets. These widgets can be used to display data
+that are updated and refreshed on the user's console.
+To do so, the widget rendering has a render loop that writes to the screen and then erases the previous output before
+writing again.
+
+**Do** keep your rendering logic as simple as possible on a single thread. Rendering additional content while a live
+rendering is in progress can cause the rendering to be corrupted.
+
+**Do not** use multiple live-rendering widgets simultaneously. Like the previous tip, displaying a `Status` control and
+a `Progress` is not supported and can cause rendering corruption.
+
+**Do** create additional work threads within the `Start` method, **but** render on the main thread.
+For items such as a progress bar, multiple threads or tasks can be created from the `Start` method for concurrent
+execution. To ensure proper rendering, ensure that calls to update the widgets are done
+on the main thread.
+
+### Unit Testing Best Practices
+
+For testing of console output, Spectre.Console has [`IAnsiConsole`](xref:T:Spectre.Console.IAnsiConsole) that can be
+injected into your application.
+The [Spectre.Console.Test](https://www.nuget.org/packages/Spectre.Console.Testing/) contains a set of utilities for
+capturing the output for verification, either manually or via a tool such
+as [Verify](https://github.com/VerifyTests/Verify).
+
+### Analyzer for Best Practices
+
+Spectre.Console has an [analyzer](https://www.nuget.org/packages/Spectre.Console.Analyzer) that helps prevent some
+common errors in writing console output from above such as using multiple live rendering widgets simultaneously,
+or using the static `AnsiConsole` class when `IAnsiConsole` is available.
+
+### Configuring the Windows Terminal For Unicode and Emoji Support
+
+Windows Terminal supports Unicode and Emoji. However, the shells such as Powershell and cmd.exe do not.
+For the difference between the two,
+see [What's the difference between a console,
+a terminal and a shell](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/whats-the-difference-between-a-console-a-terminal-and-a-shell).
+
+For PowerShell, the following command will enable Unicode and Emoji support. You can add this to your `profile.ps1`
+file:
+
+```powershell
+[console]::InputEncoding = [console]::OutputEncoding = [System.Text.UTF8Encoding]::new()
+```
+
+For cmd.exe, the following steps are required to enable Unicode and Emoji support.
+
+1. Run `intl.cpl`.
+2. Click the Administrative tab
+3. Click the Change system locale button.
+4. Check the "Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" checkbox.
+5. Reboot.
+
+You will also need to ensure that your Console application is configured to use a font that supports Unicode and Emoji,
+such as Cascadia Code.  

docs/package-lock.json

@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@
   "requires": true,
   "packages": {
     "": {
+      "name": "docs",
       "version": "1.0.0",
       "license": "MIT",
       "devDependencies": {