8 Apr
2008
8 Apr
'08
5:45 p.m.
On Tuesday 08 April 2008 03:09, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
On Sat, 2008-04-05 at 15:10 -0700, Josh Dersch wrote:
Absolutely. That "info" nonsense is bloody awful!
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical,
hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
Am I the only person in the world that likes man pages then? The GNU
utilities have "info" with a pointy-clicky hypertext interface, but like
nearly all such interfaces it's completely bloody useless and very hard
to use. Part of the problem is that nearly all of the Unix command-line
utilities can be fully explained in one short page (with a couple of
notable exceptions like grep and awk), but misguided programmers writing
the info pages feel they have to make everything a separate page, just
so they can have the front page with a big pile of links to pages, most
of which have only a couple of lines on them. Searching is impossible,
and navigation is impossible.
Just give me a nice plain flat page and let me do the searching myself.
That's what the '/' key is for.