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Sphinx
Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 12 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Slow Sphinx builds hold up documentation workUnreviewed
20132026- Sphinx builds are so slow they impede documentation work more than syntax does2024-08-01
- Finds Sphinx challenging to use, both in usability and syntax2023-12-02
- Found Sphinx slow to work with, attributed to its Python basis2023-02-09
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 13 complaints
- Becomes a huge pain to configure for building documentation2025-11-23
- Sphinx builds are so slow they impede documentation work more than syntax does2024-08-01
- Hard to set up compared with MkDocs2024-07-31
- Finds Sphinx challenging to use, both in usability and syntax2023-12-02
- Found Sphinx slow to work with, attributed to its Python basis2023-02-09
- Self-referencing cross-links confuse readers, then jump them back to the top of the page2022-10-26
- Error messages point to a huge range, so the person can't tell what's actually wrong2020-11-30
- Could not quickly figure out how to ignore files, so deleted conf.py2019-08-26
- Search leaves a lot to be desired and is slow2019-01-03
- Registering a custom builder requires a side-effect extension, with no debug output to diagnose it2017-08-14
- RST syntax is confusing with advanced constructs2017-06-04
- ReStructuredText is too burdensome to set up for non-programmer engineers2016-06-17
- Couldn't get Sphinx working; sphinx-apidoc output was not what the user expected2013-08-29