begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 04:29:39AM -0800: > Scott McClelland wrote: > > >I was refering to the subject - that you hate info and man. I know that > >sometimes you need more than the terse discription of the command, but I > >meant that navigating is easier, if you know some shortcuts. > > Probably so. But... ...vi commands? I mean, really! It's like coming > to a haystack covering an acre.
Common, simple, widely-known.... The arrows used to be on the hjkl keys. The "grep" command comes from g/re/p -- an ex/vi command. If you have a need to pick an arbitrary key-sequence, you might as well pick one of the most widely-known tools on the system to copy. In the PC world, it's mostly based off what, wordstar or somesuch? (F1 for help? WTF? Don't you people have HELP keys on your keyboards like the rest of the world?) > >I find that when man doesn't have what I need, I look for an example > >somewhere (maybe a HOWTO, or google, or a book), but it generally works as > >a reminder for something you have used before, but don't remember > >it's syntax. > > That is perhaps the best description of "man" I have heard. It is > excellent for review, or for those who are familiar with how it presents > ideas and such. But it rather lacks on giving newcomers (to a > particular command, or to "man" in general) an adequate leg up in many > cases. It's a _manual_ page. A _reference_ tool. If you need a reminder, it works. But that's not _all_ it is for -- a good command will give you a reminder about its syntax. It's a bit more than that, but a bit less than a HOWTO. (You might read a HOWTO once or twice, but use the manpage for that that same command every month after that as you need to use the command.) Back in the early 90's, a friend installed BSDI... and discovered that just about every file on the base system had a manual page. Command pages include examples, data-file pages included pointers to the relevent commands... If you have a problem with man pages on linux, the problem isn't with the concept, it's with the implementation. A _good_ manual page will have an examples section. But there's only so much you can do in a manpage... if it takes a 1.25" book to explain how to use sed and awk.... how are you going to do the same in a manpage? Or even a HOWTO? Why should you try? -Stewart "Appropriate uses for appropriate tools" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
