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More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

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Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#41

Post by Sylos »

CJefferson wrote: post #25
taneq wrote: post #21

> In a sane world, Unix vendors would have either replaced their version of more with the clearly superior less But that's just the thing - 'less' isn't "clearly superior" to 'more'. It is (or was, maybe this has changed) heavier weight and offers more functionality that may not be needed. Having both commands lets script writers use exactly the tool they need for the job. And it's not like the extra 35KB of keeping…

The problem isn't the 35k, the problem is now we all have to spend a little bit of extra brain capacity, remembering the difference between 'more' and 'less', and how while you would imagine 'more' is better (based on the traditional English meaning of the words), actually, 'more' is the lesser product. I wonder how many hours have been wasted altogether on people learning, and misunderstanding, which of more or less…

I don't think it's that bad. This is one of the cases where your usual ignorance towards new/different things is pretty effective.

At least for me personally, 'less' was what I always saw everywhere being used, and had used myself many times before I discovered that 'more' was a thing.

And when I discovered 'more', it took me maybe a minute to figure out that it's pretty much exactly like 'less', but that I didn't like it as much, and with everyone else seemingly agreeing on that, I didn't put any further thought to it.

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#42

Post by Sylos »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #37
CJefferson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't the 35k, the problem is now we all have to spend a little bit of extra brain capacity, remembering the difference between 'more' and 'less', and how while you would imagine 'more' is better (based on the traditional English meaning of the words), actually, 'more' is the lesser product. I wonder how many hours have been wasted altogether on people learning, and misunderstanding, which of more or less…

Plus, `more` as a pager command at least makes a tiny bit of sense, but `less` is a ridiculously obscure command name for beginners.

Display less at once on the screen, and make it scrollable instead, worked perfectly fine for me as an analogy. I actually find "more" less logical, because I can't find a similar analogy for it...

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#43

Post by amavisca »

pmontra wrote: post #32
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's "most" pager discussed here a week or so ago, too. (Incidentally that link returns a blank page for me on FF mobile.)

I missed most, I'll look for it. The link to pg works on my FF Android. I'm using uBlock origin. Are you using some other adblocker or add on?

The link is similarly a white screen on Android Chrome for me.

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#44

Post by zdkl »

Sylos wrote: post #42
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, `more` as a pager command at least makes a tiny bit of sense, but `less` is a ridiculously obscure command name for beginners.

Display less at once on the screen, and make it scrollable instead, worked perfectly fine for me as an analogy. I actually find "more" less logical, because I can't find a similar analogy for it...

Matter of taste, I like the image of scroll to see more

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#45

Post by hughperkins »

CJefferson wrote: post #25
taneq wrote: post #21

> In a sane world, Unix vendors would have either replaced their version of more with the clearly superior less But that's just the thing - 'less' isn't "clearly superior" to 'more'. It is (or was, maybe this has changed) heavier weight and offers more functionality that may not be needed. Having both commands lets script writers use exactly the tool they need for the job. And it's not like the extra 35KB of keeping…

The problem isn't the 35k, the problem is now we all have to spend a little bit of extra brain capacity, remembering the difference between 'more' and 'less', and how while you would imagine 'more' is better (based on the traditional English meaning of the words), actually, 'more' is the lesser product. I wonder how many hours have been wasted altogether on people learning, and misunderstanding, which of more or less…

yeah, calling it less may have been fun at the time, but its poor ui design. if you call a method 'add_one', having it multiply by three might be what you intend, but its not very intuitive.

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#46

Post by majewsky »

annnnd wrote: post #11
winteriscoming wrote: post #6

I prefer less. Incidentally, the other day I was on a CentOS system where I wanted to paginate a log file and typed in "less". Turns out, unlike more, less isn't installed by default. Was a bit surprised because I was under the impression that most Linux systems would have had it in their default install.

Debian doesn't install it by default either - agree, surprising. On another note, even more surprising is less's behavior with colored output (you have -r and -R switches, which are almost, but not completely, alike; and in neither of them does page-up render properly).

> neither of them does page-up render properly

Huh? "less -R" has always been working like a charm for me, for scrolling in both directions. Maybe it's related to your terminal emulator? (I use Konsole.)

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#47

Post by vertex-four »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #20
flukus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cmd.exe starts in a second, powershell takes 5 and then another 10 to actually be interactive. So it's still useful to me.

Plus who would use these weird script language. Common! Even bash scripting it's more easy that powershell!

Err. Bash scripting is awful. Trying to figure out what chain of commands you need to pull out that one particular piece of data from the output of that command... I've seen a dozen lines to manage it in some cases before, or calling out to a script in Awk or Perl. And then it won't work when you update your system because somebody decided to update a command's output format just slightly.

Powershell is an object-oriented scripting language along the lines of something like Python, just with different syntax and more of a focus on managing services. It also has reasonable syntax for applying one command to the result of another - the pipe operator. And it's reasonable to use it in day-to-day usage as a command line.

I've written a Powershell script to change an Exchange server setting we needed to change ever so often, faster than I could ever write a bash script to do the same. Under Linux, I'd likely have given up trying to use bash to edit a config, and just started writing an m4 file which generates the config as part of a cron job.

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#49

Post by pmontra »

amavisca wrote: post #43
pmontra wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I missed most, I'll look for it. The link to pg works on my FF Android. I'm using uBlock origin. Are you using some other adblocker or add on?

The link is similarly a white screen on Android Chrome for me.

Hopefully this works http://man.he.net/?topic=pg&section=all

The page source is as simple as it could have been in 1996 :-)

The original link has a broken table layout with some unbalanced and . Maybe that breaks rendering on your browsers, but why not on my Firefox?

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