[TUHS] earliest Unix roff

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday, 17 September 2019 at  7:42:28 +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Sep 2019, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>> Fair enough, but be careful, while I admit I have not looked in a while,
>> info(gnu) relies on emacs keybindings and a number of very
>> emacs'ish things. Every time I have tried to deal with it, I have
>> unprogram my fingers and reset them to emacs.
>
> Yep, which is why I like "info" as much as I like EMACS i.e. not at
> all.

Maybe I've missed something, but I'm in the intermediate camp.  Emacs
is in my fingertips, and I wouldn't want to live without it, but I'd
far rather see info go away.  In some ways it anticipated HTML, but I
find navigation particularly painful.

> What exactly is wrong with the manpage format?

It's linear.

> It tells you everything you need to know, and tells you where to
> find further information.

Yes, but you need to follow the link manually.  Theoretically a good
HTML document would be better, but it's nice to have a linear form
that you can search.

For an extreme case of man pages, look at something like mplayer(1) or
mpv(1):

  $ man mplayer|wc -l
     9435
  $ man mpv|wc -l
     13939

That doesn't make them easy to read.

Greg
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