Charles --
...and then Charles Curley said...
% On Thu, Apr 13, 2000 at 04:26:49PM +0100, Lars Hecking wrote:
% ->
% -> > doc/manual.txt may be there, but for reading on line and searching it is
% -> > nearly useless.
% ->
% -> Not true. Get a decent text viewer. For instance less.
%
% Lars, it comes across as a bit arrogant to say, if you don't like the way
% we do things, then change the way you do things.
I admit that the answer was a little terse, but it's not entirely
unfounded. You didn't tell everyone up front that you were particularly
tied to emacs (and I'll even try to not start a religious war!) so the
logical assumption was simply that you were throwing any tool handy, like
vi, at the file. It wasn't meant to be edited, though, but just read, so
just read it with a reader and keep things simple.
I see that you've seen the col solution in other bits of this thread; you
can probably even read that into a buffer dynamically and enjoy emacss
searching without a temp file hanging around. Frankly, I'm surprised
that emacs *doesn't* have a "mode" or "filter" or whatever to handle
this; perhaps it's because less (or even good old more) does a pretty
good job :-)
%
% Less is all very well and good, but I use Emacs for a reason: I know how
% to use its advanced search and multi-windowing capabilities, and would
% prefer a common denominator file format that lets me and anyone else,
% regardless of their predelictions for viewers, use it.
Fine and dandy. Yes, basic simple ASCII is just about the lowest common
denominator, and as long as the EOL format is correct anyone can use it,
right? ASCII doesn't support such fancy things as bold and underline and
such, which UNIX man pages have had *forever* and which are (or at least
as it seems to me) pretty well accepted in the UNIX community.
%
% Now, if there is an Emacs mode, I'd like to hear about it. I expect that
% those who use VIM might like to hear about a VIM equivalent.
%
% BTW, does this format, with the ^h_ sequences for emphasis have a name?
I don't know about that, but it's what troff (first in my knowledge)
generates for underlining, with ^h providing bold (because
the same char prints twice). Other tools since then, including TeX and
dvi2ascii, do the same thing.
%
% ->
% -> > It appears to be designed to throw at a printer. The ^h_
Or a glass tty :-)
% -> > stuff for underlining makes it impossible to read headlines, and makes
% -> > searches difficult because you may have to search twice. How about also
That's another trick; once you've been around it long enough, you can
read right through it. Kind of like rot13 :-) You can also pretty
easily whip up a search that covers both cases with only a little extra
typing.
% -> > including the manual as html?
% ->
% -> The html manual i_s_ included.
%
% Where?
I just have to say that this had me laughing pretty hard. That darned
web thingy has just polluted everything; here you want something simple
that can be viewed with a text editor, and you ask for an html version??
[Why, back in *my* day, we had to dial up our uucp connection and
download the newsfeed if we wanted to get files, and we had to use the
letter 'o' because zero hadn't been invented yet... ;-]
%
% --
% -- C^2
:-D
--
David T-G * It's easier to fight for one's principles
(play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * than to live up to them. -- fortune cookie
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The "new millennium" starts at the beginning of 2001. There was no year 0.
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