4 ms·

I think it's definitely a case of "worse is better", not because it's "good enough" but because man pages are just "plain text" without the ToC or hyperlink fea

I think it's definitely a case of "worse is better", not because it's "good enough" but because man pages are just "plain text" without the ToC or hyperlink features of texinfo. There is no interface, it's just blasted into a pager and you use the familiar interface of less or more or whatever to navigate. It's the difference between man/less showing '(press h for help or q to quit)' and Info showing 'Type H for help, h for tutorial.' I accept Info's technical superiority, but I've never intentionally used it because man/less works well enough without having to learn a new interface. (the other elephant in the room is HTML/web browsers, which I think eclipse Info in reach and familiarity so much that no-one would want to learn a secondary rich-text hyperlinked document viewer)

somat 4y ago
An interesting tangent to this. The openbsd manual renderer (mandoc) creates less tags which can help on some of the bigger pages (ksh, pf.conf, ifconfig) An example: to get to the inet option in ifconfig, the normal '/inet' search will have a lot of false positives. but the tag ':tinet' search goes to the item in question. Nothing against gnu info pages but I always preferred man pages as it feels like less cognitive effort to use. The less tags are indicative of openbsd culture where they try to improve existing systems. linux(due to it's development model) has a tricky problem where it is very hard to improve anything. you can only create something new and abandon the old.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  TIL about "less tags" This is a big help in reading openbsd docs, where they tend to put a lot in one page. For example, linux will split up the openssl man pages, one for each subcommand. OpenBSD has one page. With less as my PAGER, hitting :tx509 makes that a lot easier. Also discovered you can do this: man -O tag=x509 openssl Thanks!

somat 4y ago

An interesting tangent to this. The openbsd manual renderer (mandoc) creates less tags which can help on some of the bigger pages (ksh, pf.conf, ifconfig) An example: to get to the inet option in ifconfig, the normal '/inet' search will have a lot of false positives. but the tag ':tinet' search goes to the item in question. Nothing against gnu info pages but I always preferred man pages as it feels like less cognitive effort to use. The less tags are indicative of openbsd culture where they try to improve existing systems. linux(due to it's development model) has a tricky problem where it is very hard to improve anything. you can only create something new and abandon the old.

SoftTalker 4y ago
TIL about "less tags" This is a big help in reading openbsd docs, where they tend to put a lot in one page. For example, linux will split up the openssl man pages, one for each subcommand. OpenBSD has one page. With less as my PAGER, hitting :tx509 makes that a lot easier. Also discovered you can do this: man -O tag=x509 openssl Thanks!