Sponsored link
Serve your customers, not your servers, with VERIO Linux VPS. Full-access test-drive here.
| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Fish - The friendly interactive shell
Fish - The friendly interactive shell
Posted May 19, 2005 10:43 UTC (Thu) by fatrat (subscriber, #1518)Parent article: Fish - The friendly interactive shell
The one thing I really dislike is the decision to make "help" spawn a browser. A lot of the time I'm ssh'd in remotely to a machine. I don't want (or need) a web browser but I do need the help.
It's like GNU's whole info system; *well written* man pages are fine. Why create a whole other tree of information that has to be looked after?
Help for a shell must live within the shell.
(Log in to post comments)
Fish - The friendly interactive shell
Posted May 19, 2005 11:26 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
No need to fear. I do the same thing all the time, so I'd obviously make sure fish fails gracefully when X is missing. :)
The browser finding code checks if you have the DISPLAY variable set, and if not, it only tries to use text-based browsers like lynx, links, e3m, etc.. Fish also respects the BROWSER environment variable, so you can specify any browser you want.
As to well written man pages, I think they are fine for everything that is smaller than five or ten pages. But after that, you really start missing hyperlinks...