man pages

man pages

Posted Sep 6, 2008 16:55 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: man pages by bronson
Parent article: Feature removal sparks Git flamewar

[another killer feature that tradition man has that the proposed replacement doesn't is] that you can trivially search the entire topic (page). You ever try to find something in pinfo when you can't remember what page it's on? It gets tedious quick.

You're referring to the fact that in these systems you can (and therefore do) break a manual up into subtopics such as a separate page per subcommand. (Though I haven't actually experienced it with pinfo; when I've used pinfo, the entire topic, e.g. GNU libc, has been one searchable unit).

That's a good point, and one that has always bugged me about the worldwide web too. I don't suppose it would be hard to achieve that by having a browser function to combine the entire tree below the index page into a single document. Then you can still organize the documentation by directory hierarchy and provide direct access to a page, but also be able to browse the entire topic at once.

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