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Re: manpage for GNU utilities?



Chris Lawrence <quango@ix.netcom.com> writes:

First let me say that I have no problem with updated man-pages.

> Last I checked, it also had incomprehensible key-bindings (which
> permanently discouraged me from using it) and took up space on my
> hard drive that could be better used.  I have used info (so I do
> have knowledge of the tools available), and found it a rather
> worthless tool for reading documentation for those reasons; your
> mileage may vary.

Well, as you said, YMMV, but I used to be annoyed with info, and I
agree that the keybindings were non-intuitive, but things are quite a
bit better now.  At the very least, the arrow and paging keys finally
work.  And for those interested, "l" (go back to the last location)
and "Ctrl-s" (recursive incremental search) are both quite useful.

> Ok, so I have to install yet another application capable of reading info
> files just to get relevant information on a command?  Info is only useful
> for one thing: reading info files.  If the information was provided as a man
> page or a HTML file, info wouldn't be necessary on my system.

It's an old observation, but how to you recursively search an html
tree for the info you want (like Ctrl-s in info, Meta-s in emacs, or
"/" in manpages with less?)

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94  53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30


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