Makefile UX: friendlier defaults, help target, pixi pre-flight check

[viniciusdc]

The Makefile has grown organically. After #43 lands it's also implicitly assuming pixi is installed, which is the right call but worth handling gracefully. Some polish ideas worth considering — none urgent, none required.

Default behavior

• make with no args currently does nothing useful. Default to make help.
• Add a help target that lists every other target with a one-line description. The common pattern is to put ## description comments next to each target and parse them with awk:

  help:  ## Show this help
  	@awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*##"} /^[a-zA-Z_-]+:.*?##/ { printf "  \033[36m%-12s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$2 }' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)

Pre-flight checks

• Detect if pixi is on PATH. If not, print a friendly install pointer and exit cleanly rather than letting every target fail with pixi: command not found.
• Optional: make doctor target that prints resolved versions (pixi, Node, npm, astro) — useful when something's wedged.

Missing targets

• clean — remove dist/, .astro/, node_modules/, .pixi/ (or some subset). Useful when state is corrupted.
• open or an extension of dev that also opens http://localhost:4321 in the browser (open on macOS, xdg-open on Linux).

Polish

• Echo a short banner before each target (==> dev: starting Astro dev server on http://localhost:4321) so the output isn't just a wall of npm.
• make post error message could show accepted TYPE values (note | arch) instead of only naming the flag.
• Light per-target color via tput setaf for the banner lines — not a full prompt UI, just stand-out section headers.

Out of scope

• Switching away from make to just / task / similar runners. The point is to polish what's there, not replace it.

Related

• chore: add pixi env for local dev (Node 22 from conda-forge) #43 (pixi env) — this issue assumes that's merged.