Re: Man pages missing

[Zefram <zefram@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>]

Juergen Christoffel wrote:
>It started with tools like perl; I'm a regular perl user and would not
>want to miss it; but I remember the feeling I had when I first saw the
>30 or so pages of perl in the early days. And as the man pages grow
>larger it gets more difficult to locate a specific section because I
>can't browse the whole stuff anymore and to find it with a regexp I
>sometimes need two or three approaches to find stuff if I don't
>remember the exact wording I'm looking for.

perl's OK.  A quick look at perl(1) will generally indicate which man
page actually contains the desired information, which one can the drag
a regexp over.  It's the same with zsh, except that zshall(1) can be
used to skip the first step (provided, of course, you have a caching
(or exceptionally fast) man pager).

>There's no need to print out a manual if you don't want to. Today a
>hypertext approach would work for me due to tools like lynx (the vt100

Actually lynx uses curses; it's not limited to vt100s.

>based web browser, so you wouldn't need Netscape or its ilk) or Emacs'
>info mode. For me it's much more effective to browse through a well
>organized manual with lynx or emacs than it is to page through 60+
>pages of man pages with less.

For me, it's much more effective to have all the documentation in one
place, and browse it with my preferred pager.  Hypertext just gets in
the way of the information, and there still isn't a hypertext system
that formats to look as good as man pages.  (And have you ever tried to
read `all the documentation' on some subject, when said documentation
is arranged as an arbitrary directed graph of fifty nodes of two pages
each?)

-zefram