11 Apr
2008
11 Apr
'08
12:59 p.m.
On 09/04/2008, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <1481.1207762811 at mini>,
Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> writes:
I have no objection to 'man' pages, although many of them badly need a
concise clear overview when they actually leap into a list of
switches. The thing is, it's 2008. I object to having to quit out and
type 'man 3 command' when I should just be able to tab over to the
referred subpage and hit Enter. I'm not asking for it all to be turned
into fully-crosslinked indexed hypertext, I'm just asking for some
tiny bit of heed to be paid to 30y of progress in HCI and UI design!
--
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So I'd offer that info pages are more than
just cumbersome poorly
hypertext'd documents. They are part of a larger system which has goals
beyond just simple man pages.
In theory I don't disagree with what info pages *could* be. In
practice though, they end up being vastly inferior to the man pages
that they replaced. A man page is best at succinctly communicating
important information about a utility: summary of usage, command-line
options supported, environment variables consumed, etc. I wouldn't
want to write a book using the an macro set for troff, but every time
I just need a quick piece of information about a command-line utility
and try to get it out of info, its a huge PITA.
Of course some things need a bona-fide full-featured cross-linked
manual -- just look at how many man pages perl sprawls across these
days.