[TUHS] earliest Unix roff

Bakul Shah bakul at bitblocks.com
Tue Sep 17 05:31:30 AEST 2019


The way Rob solved the problem in acme(1) is much nicer.
Right click on |open(2)| and its man page opens up in a
new window. You can do the same on any manpage mentioned
in the SEE ALSO section or anywhere else and you can see
their man page without any side-effect on the original
window. He didn't throw out any old documentation but
added a a new tool to make navigation easier (and it is
more general in that you can define right click actions).

There was already cursor positioning available in vi. It
would not have been a real stretch to hack in acme like
support in less or vi (clumsier without a mouse but still).
In fact tag support in vi already did something like it
with ^] and ^^ for jump/back.


> On Sep 16, 2019, at 8:14 AM, Richard Salz <rich.salz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Is it any surprise that the early GNU effort was really trying to recreate ITS?  Can you really blame them?  I'm grateful that they made `info` be a standalone program.  Putting the concept of "cursor position" into the existing pagers (more/less/etc) and doing jump/xref/back would be more than a stretch, IMO.
> 



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