On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 12:03:14PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > > Your thinking is intelligent and cogent -- but your factual > premise is wrong, leading you to an incorrect model of my > assumptions. On my usual desktop arrangement, rendering man > pages in a browser *would* in fact have the cost of popping up > a browser. It is indicative that I don't have one up right > now. >
I stand corrected on your desktop set up, but I'm willing to concede only half the point. With your desktop, calling up a man page from your editor would cause a browser to pop up. That's a little distracting, perhaps, but not nearly so much as having to switch desktops. > > One could argue, I suppose, that this just > > shows that ESR is correct and we should > > stick to a single window, but there's a > > whole bunch of us who disagree. > > Heh. For the record, "ESR" himself wouldn't make that > argument. :-) > I was a sloppy here. What I meant is a single *virtual desktop*, not a single application window. > > You skipped a step. You have a good point about calling up > manual pages within an editor, but not all character-cell > displays are equivalent; it doesn't follow from this that > man(1) through xterm has any value that lynx(1) through xterm > wouldn't. I'll be interested to see if you can make that > argument, especially since Gunnar ducked it. > I think someone made (almost) that argument earlier. That person posted that man with less was more convenient and powerful (?) than a browser because of navigation and searching issues. Regarding man/less vs. lynx, I would have to agree. Let's face it, lynx navigation sucks and the only benefit that I can see is that you get hyperlinks. I'm not sure (admittedly because I haven't had the ability) that hyperlinks make up for the loss of easy navigation and searching. But, really, I think that misses the point. I doubt anyone would prefer lynx/xterm over, say, firefox for viewing man pages. The question is whether there are some situations in which a traditional man page rendered in a character display makes sense. For me, and I think many others, getting a man page in an editor window does make sense and I wouldn't want to lose that ability. When I'm looking at a man page for, say, bogofilter, then a browser based display would probably be preferable because I'm not already in my editor. > Until somebody meets that challenge, I'll stick with my > diagnosis of arrested development. It's not arrested development to prefer to retain a useful capability (man pages in an editor) rather than move to a browser based system whose main benefit is hyperlinks. Especially if you don't think hyperlinks are particularly valuable for the types of man pages you typically bring up in an editor. > It's not one I make casually -- I've been thinking *hard* about > Unix UI, from a position deep within Unix culture, for half a > decade now. I know you have; let me say again that I approve of this project and appreciate your efforts on its behalf. jcs _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
