One of those monumental days ........

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 11:21:45PM -0500, William Park wrote
> On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 10:00:13PM -0600, Sy Ali wrote:
> > On 11/6/05, Fraser Campbell <fraser-eicrhRFjby5dCsDujFhwbypxlwaOVQ5f at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > > It's nice to see people recognizing Linux as a legitimate OS, other
> > > times you just wonder where they've been for 5 years, or 10 years
> > > even.
> > 
> > Trying to understand the man pages..
> 
> True.  If manpages were coded in HTML format instead of nroff, that
> alone would be a giant leap.

  For some commands, man pages would be a *MAJOR* improvement.

<RANT>

  I'm talking specifically about "info".  Remember the old text
adventure games like Zork?  You'd press an arrow in a random direction,
trying to get to your destination.  Instead, you'd end up in some random
chamber on another level.  You could easily waste hours playing the game.
"info" works exactly the same way... *BUT I DON'T WANNA WASTE MY TIME
PLAYING GAMES AND NAVIGATING UP AND DOWN BETWEEN RANDOM LEVELS WHEN I'M
MERELY TRYING TO FIND THE PROPER SYNTAX FOR A LINUX COMMAND*!!!

  - Give me a large manpage, and I'll use the "/" key to find what I'm
    looking for.
  - Give me one large text file and I'll use the "/" key to find what
    I'm looking for (in vim).
  - Give me one large HTML file and I'll use {CTRL-F} to find what I'm
    looking for.

  *PLEASE DON'T* chop it up into tiny little pieces that I have to
navigate through like levels in Zork.  This applies not only to "info",
but also to those idotic HTML "documents" where each sentence or
paragraph is its own web page, and you have to navigate up and down
levels like crazy.

</RANT>

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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