[haiku] Re: Man
- From: Ben Allen <ben.allen@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:38:42 -0500
On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Christoph Thompson
<cjsthompson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
> I fully agree with Euan Kirkhope. Haiku is a desktop OS and therefore
> reading documentation inside a terminal is (mostly) pointless.
Keep in mind that people would be using man to read manual pages for
*console* commands. We're not talking about using man pages as the
primary documentation source for the system. A normal GUI application
would not be providing documentation in the form of man pages. The
people that use man would already be using the terminal, so being able
to access documentation directly in the terminal would, to borrow the
idea of your final paragraph, be less confusing to the user by not
requiring them to launch a separate application just for viewing
documentation. Plus, opening documentation in a separate application
might not always be possible, for example when connecting to a system
remotely via ssh. If a user preferred to view documentation in a web
browser, then this is certainly also possible thanks to utilities like
man2html (perhaps it would be useful to add an extra command-line
option to man that automatically runs man2html and opens the resulting
page in a web browser).
-Ben
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