Re: manual pages

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au>]

Neil Zanella wrote:
> Thank you David and Maciej for your replies,
>
> Nevertheless I would like to point out some advantages of man pages:
>
> 1. it comes in handy when you know the function name and just want to
>     quickly double check the signature and function arguments without
>     spending more than 5 seconds on it (but it takes 5 seconds just to
>     get mozilla or devhelp up, maybe 8 seconds... it comes down to speed).
>
> 2. You may not be connected, hence man pages are better in that situation.
>
> -----------------
>
> Finally, I think apt-get is a debian command isn't it? I'm running Fedora and
> have yum, but that's about it it seems. Anyways, I have dev help. I hate
> having to use the mouse but anyways. It'm just used to this neat CTRL-Z
> to stop and bring up the man page, scroll, press q...
>
> Hmm... guess what, if none is available I might develop a command line
> version of devhelp since I love the command line so much! I hate having
> to use the mouse cause it's a slow thing I've got to reach for far far away
> from the keyboard. :-)
>
> Anyways, I'm half joking, but might implement a command line version of
> devhelp for real if I have time :-) there's not much to the GUI anyways,
> hmm... an ncurses based version wouldn't hurt (rpm -qi ncurses). But
> most of us will have our hands on an xterm anyways when coding,
> so why not just keep it all accessible from there. :-) After all, it is
> documentation for developers, not for end users...
>
> Thank you for your replies,

The main advantage of help browsers like devhelp is incremental and
interactive search which is useful for finding things that you don't
know the precise name of.