Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future

[Michael Parson]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 02:09:52PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Joerg van den Hoff <address@hidden>:
>
>> well at least I would argue that navigating with `less' through the
>> man output is superior to `lynx' for the same purpose
>
> In what way?  That is, what actual capabilities and behaviors are you
> basing that evaluation on?

I've been quiet through this, but I agree with Joerg, I do not like
lynx(1) as a text reader, nor am I looking for hyperlinks in my man
pages.  For grins, I just fired up links(1) on a text file, it's a
touch better than lynx, but not quite.  I still much prefer to read
text with less(1) as it more closely matches how I do things with all
other programs.  I'm a one-big-xterm kind of guy, inside of which I
run screen(1).  For the most part, the reason I run X (or a graphical
environment at all) is so I can get larger xterms.  So, with screen, vi,
and less, I have a fairly consistent way of moving around my blocks of
text, slight variations here and there, but for the most part, it feels
pretty consistent to me.

Another thing, It is quite rare that I would be reading the man page
on the console of the box that I've got my display from.  As a systems
administrator, quite a bit of my man page reading is done on some remote
box, over an ssh session, very possibly not even the same OS as the box
that is providing my display, said host might not even know I've got a
graphical ability, or have a browser installed, even one as simple as
lynx.

When I run man(1), I want formatted ascii paged with less, I could even
do without the bold text. =)

-- 
Michael Parson
address@hidden