Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1461 mails)

[Joachim Schrod <jschrod@xxxxxxx>]

John E. Perry wrote:
> D. McGarrett wrote:
> > Linda Walsh wrote:
> > > Cristian Rodríguez wrote:
> > > > ...
> > OS's  contributors  take a more friendly view of their possible users, and
> > make the system more user-friendly.  I hate to say, more Windows-like, but
> > at least more DOS/CPM like.  Well, flame me, I suppose, but I think this
> > would be useful.
>
> ...so, Doug, let me deflect the flames from you by attracting them to
> myself :-).
>
> I've used unix for decades, and I've always despised the stupid man
> paradigm.  Basically, to find anything in man, you have to know it
> already, and even apropos doesn't help a lot.  A curses implementation
> would have helped, but it was never developed, as far as I know.

Having struggled for the last few days to learn more about HAL,
ConsoleKit, and PackageKit, I would have loved if there would be
man pages that are as succinct and precise as they are for standard
Single Unix(tm) functionality. Instead one follows one Web site to
the other with horrible formatting and unstructured information.
There is a reason why POSIX followed the man page paradigms in its
write up, there is even a rational in the standard.

Concerning curses implementation -- why not a GUI? For the old
timers, there has always been xman and tkman, of course. Both also
provide a browser for man pages.
To get an overview, there is an intro man page in each section.

Full text search in man pages is supplied by several options that
were not available in the past, admittedly.

Concerning GNU info -- I don't know what you mean about
keyboard-centric. My Emacs has a full WIMP interface for it. The
info program is only an afterthought for those vi lusers. (Donning
on asbesto underwear and ducking... ;-)

        Joachim

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Joachim Schrod                          Email: jschrod@xxxxxxx
Roedermark, Germany

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