On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 03:37:46PM +1030, Matthew Haub wrote:
> We no longer track upstream less(1). The last sync was 7
> years ago.
Nicholas Marriott asked:
> Yes, but is that for a reason or just because nobody has
> updated it?
Han Boetes replied
| Because everybody uses w3m to replace less and lynx nowadays.
Everybody? I must confess that in 25 years of using Unix systems and
9.5 years of using OpenBSD I'd never heard of 'w3m' before now, but a
quick look in wikipedia suggests that it might be a useful program to
have around. I'll probably install the package when I move to 4.7.
However, I don't see w3m as in any way replacing less, for two quite
fundamental reasons:
* less is in base; w3m isn't
* less is a program for looking at files which may contain fairly
arbitrary "printable" content; w3m is (or at least is described in
/usr/ports/www/w3m/pkg/DESCR as being) a web browser, i.e., a program
for rendering web pages which supposedly contain html documents
I also don't see w3m as making lynx obselete:
* lynx is in base; w3m isn't
* lynx doesn't load images, so malicious images (e.g., ones containing
buffer-overflow exploits for some image library) won't affect it;
lynx has options to support displaying inline images when run from
an xterm
ciao,
--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]"
<jth...@astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
Dept of Astronomy, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
"C++ is to programming as sex is to reproduction. Better ways might
technically exist but they're not nearly as much fun." -- Nikolai Irgens
