Live data from Hacker News

Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

lalitm.com

81–85 of 85 posts

Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's guaranteed to be some sort of context-sensitive man plugin for vim &| nvim for shell scripts. Also, have you ever seen the DOS Borland IDE context sensitive help UX?

I think for Vim, it’s “K”. But for emacs, you only need to use “m-x man” and have a nice viewer.

Cool. And GNU "info" is a hyperlinked doc viewer system. Some GNU and other projects promote info doc as more authoritative than man pages. Man pages are expanded cheat sheets.

For in-depth doc, I do appreciate docset-based indexed search apps like Dash that can download and update comprehensive doc locally with greater performance and less internet dependency than internet only. There's even vim and nvim plugins to bring that to them too without leaving the terminal.

Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said "khelpcenter", not "man".

Ok well we were discussing man, not khelpcenter, so that seems irrelevant...

We were discussing replacing man, so a replacement that does as requested is very relevant.

Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

#83
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a minor alteration to an existing program to support a good suggestion. Why is it that the Rust community thinks that the solution to every flaw in an application is a rewrite in Rust?

Programs these old are controlled by people who are very strongly opposed to change, even if it improves things. They like living in the 80s. I absolutely guarantee if you propose this change the the GNU neckbeards who control man they will come up with some bullshit technical reason why it can't be done.

GNU has its own documentation format called 'info'.

Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

#84
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a multitude of manpagers and viewers and frontends. It's one of those things you can write yourself very easily.

Any that have this feature? I did try batman but it only replaces the pager; not the man frontend which is where this change would need to happen.

Not that I know of, but I haven't looked. I have written a similar program for pulling arm64 instruction pages (which have many duplicates), the whole thing is under 100 lines, and most of that is printing and file IO that would be handled by the manpager, the actual finding dups and presenting a menu is even simpler.

Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

#85
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation. If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.

Or a minor alteration to an existing program to support a good suggestion. Why is it that the Rust community thinks that the solution to every flaw in an application is a rewrite in Rust?

Because it might be the only way to introduce new vulnerabilities. See Ubuntu.
Post reply on HN