OT Humble Pie

[Johnson David]

On Monday 31 March 2003 07:12 pm, Frans-Jan v. Steenbeek wrote:
> IMHO the concept of "man-pages" is as good
> as outdated as GUI-enviroments become more popular.

One could almost say that books are as good as outdated as television 
becomes more popular :-)

The alternative to man pages would seem to be some sort of browser, and 
HTML makes sense. But man pages are more than just pages. They are 
pages indexed into an information system. You gain one form of 
flexibility by moving to a browser, but at the expense of another kind. 
You don't want to be typing "mozilla 
file:/usr/share/man/man1/cat_1.html". You want the man pages at your 
fingertips.

The solution is to integrate man pages into a browser. This has already 
been done! Using KDE, I can view the man pages index Konqueror by 
typing "man:" as the URL. I can also use the KDE Help Center for the 
same thing. Also in Konqueror I can go right to the man page I want by 
typing "man:cat" or "#cat". Best of all, the man pages are now 
pleasantly formatted and *hyperlinked*. (KDE needs to add "apropos" as 
an IO slave as well).

There are other similar solutions. I brought up KDE because I am more 
familiar with it.

David