So I've been thinking, and we know how that leads to danger.
One time, I experimentally modified (CHEMICAL X!) the perldoc on my MSWin
laptop so that when I ran perldoc whatever, instead of throwing Pod::Text
at the retrieved pod and then feeding the output to more.com, it would
instead run a krazy module of my own that would render the document to RTF,
and open Wordpad on it. Why? It's in its own happy little window, it's
scrollable, it's searchable, it shows formatting -- four things not true of
normal perldoc under MSWin.
Now, it's not too hard to set normal perldoc to use a normal text editor
(or even a new instance of list.com or the like, via "start.exe list.com
foo.txt") as a pager; but I really like formatting!
I could have just used a pod-to-html class and opened a browser on the
resulting document (start.exe foo.html), but sometimes I don't already have
a browser open, and I'm really adverse to waiting 5 (going on 25) seconds
for a browser to open when I just want to quickly know the answer to
"what's the sixth parameter from stat() mean?".
So that's where Wordpad comes in -- it's pretty lightweight. Open an RTF
document with it ("write.exe foo.rtf"), and it starts up pretty fast.
But the disadvantage is that I think (think!) that some older MSWins don't
come with a write.exe that supports reading RTF -- their write.exe really
is the nasty old WinWrite or whatever, which is as dumb as mud and about as
useful.
My question is: does anyone have a better idea for how to view formatted
Pod under MSWin, something ideally portable and not-bloaty? I'm tending to
consider something Tk-based as both not-portable, and possibly bloaty.
Ideally, if someone comes up with a portable and not-bloaty solution, we
could say "aha, so we'll just wrap that with Pod::MSWinMagic or whatever,
and make perldoc under MSWin call that by default!".
--
Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
