However, please note that more(1) also was inspired by, almost copied
from, ITS. Certainly the prompt --More-- is.
Absolutely. A friend of mine/fellow UCB grad student, Eric Shienbrood, wrote it. He was a MIT undergrad. And Eric happily said it was modeled from ITS.
And before, Eric wrote it, UNIX lacked anything like it. Which to me is fine, taking an idea from another system to add a new feature that is lacking.
What irks me is the blatant force-feeding of any system to the users, be it ITS, UNIX or Windows into another. It's ok to offer an alternative interface, but when the system has a mechanism, your tools need to be socially compliant with it, not try to make 'those users become like me.' Frankly, that is a pretty arrogant behavior. Yes, I know the argument is two fold. GNU is not UNIX and we wrote it (he who has the gold, gets to rule).
BTW: If it makes you feel better, I've been fighting this attitude at a number of places, particularly Intel, for years. For instance, our dev tools folks wrote their own Installer 'because it was easier for them and they could use it everywhere'). That's a no-no. If you have Windows product, you must use Microsoft's installer, if you have a Mac, you use what Apple gives you, if you have VMS, you used the (wretched) setld, or in this case, for Linux its rpm/yum et al.; etc. But they had their own 'installer group' and it was easier for >>them<< than for the users.
I think the rule of 'least astonishment' is what needs to be the high order bit when building tools for people. Again, offering emacs (or any other ITS tool) is fine, but when the new tool is installed on Windows/UNIX/Mac et.. it needs to behave itself with the rest of the system, particularly if there is already a mechanism in place to do a support function.
Simply, I would not mind info(gnu) and texinfo(gnu) if there was a way to created man pages (or Windows / Mac help). But having a man page that basically says, see figure one is not cool.
my 2 cents from a grumpy old guy....
Clem