On 2007-03-20, Joerg van den Hoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > this exchange is a matter-of taste decision against it using arguments which > would be equally suited to propose dumping manpages written in -man.
*roff-man is antiquated, and should be replaced. Too bad TeXinfo sucks bad, and if such a system was designed by the kids today, it would be XML shite. I rather stick to *roff-man. > come on: "unintelligible pairs of characters" in contrast to ion3 keyboard > shortcuts which lend themselves immediately to memorizing??? I'd estimate > that I continously use about 10-20 ion3 keybindings and probably fewer > `-ms' names. I still manage to handle that... I also prefer clear intelligible commands to a zillion key bindings. I prefer writing, say, \alpha in LaTeX, than Control+Shift+Meta+Whatever+a, or something, is some formula editor might provide as a "shortcut" (the term implies flawed design) alternative to mousing. The LaTeX command is very intelligible; that key sequence isn't. > correct for you because you know latex. the other way round for me because > I know groff. what kind of criterion is that? I could understand much of LaTeX source without knowing any LaTeX. Not so with *roff (or plain-TeX, for the matter... any many Wiki markups are quite awful too). > beauty is in the eye of the beholder... And I prefer uninterrupted text that looks like a document with some commands in it, to what looks like a session in some archaic cryptic shell... > I'd rather get a mutt-like _comprehensive_ user manual which contrary to the > above idea would stay useful even for the permanent ion3-user. the kind of > really basic interactive tutorial, which seems to be more the intent as I now > see, probably will be used (and be useful) only at the very first day of > using ion3. > that's a waste of effort in my view. I prefer the simple statusbar help screen... > so, please stay at least with 'man/ groff -man' (but why that in contrast > to `groff -ms' is tolerable remains obscure to me), Because it provides something that other formats do not provide: compatibility with the man system. I'm sure there's something that can provide `catman` output for less etc. from HTML, and thus from various other source formats. -- Tuomo
