[haiku] Re: Man
- From: Justin Stressman <jstressman@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:06:36 -0400
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:33 PM, Christoph Thompson
<cjsthompson@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 2:51 AM, <hudsonco1@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>
>> Where is this Haiku user's guide?
>>
>
> http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/contents.html
>
I just wanted to chime in and say that just earlier today I was reading
through the user guide
http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/gui.html
And I noted to myself how much I loved the clean and beautiful design that
fit the Haiku aesthetic so well.
I have a hard time deciding where I stand on this argument... but I think
put simply there is a place for command line man pages or the like. If
someone is already on the command line, which is an option, then it's so
much easier to type "man ls" or something than to have to fire up a browser
and look it up in there.
While I think the idea that "command --help" should tell people what they
need to know, that can be a bit limited for complex CLI tools. Although the
argument could be made that --help should give the basics, and if you
honestly need more than that, you should spend the time opening the relevant
help documents in the browser, where they can be formatted much more nicely,
linked with indexes, better examples laid out etc.
I do really understand the idea that Haiku is meant to be a GUI. Not a
graphical wrapper over command line tools. One of the reasons I dislike
Linux etc is because they are built on top of all that legacy cruft. They
are at heart still old command line UNIX OSs with all the esoteric command
line wizardry NECESSARY to really use and maintain your OS. And that leads
to a lot of inconsistency, conflict, confusion, etc. Sure it can be
powerful, but I find it far from elegant today.
The first thing I fell in love with in Haiku was the simplicity and the
aesthetic. It was clean, simple, elegant. And now with Web+ it has a browser
that is equally clean, quick, elegant, etc.
So I guess in the end my vote (based on the discussion so far) comes down to
"--help should provide what you need for simple command usage. Anything more
complex should be referred to the proper html styled help that looks like
the current Haiku User Guide." That way you don't end up having to support
multiple formats for help files, and both quick usage reference and complex
usage reference are both handled appropriately to the level of
responsiveness and detail needed for each.
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