Re: If it is still unclear to someone...

On 2007-03-20, Joerg van den Hoff <[email protected]> wrote:
> this exchange is a matter-of taste decision against it using arguments which
> would be equally suited to propose dumping manpages written in -man.

*roff-man is antiquated, and should be replaced. Too bad TeXinfo sucks 
bad, and if such a system was designed by the kids today, it would be
XML shite. I rather stick to *roff-man.

> come on: "unintelligible pairs of characters" in contrast to ion3 keyboard
> shortcuts which lend themselves immediately to memorizing???  I'd estimate
> that I continously use about 10-20 ion3 keybindings and probably fewer
> `-ms' names. I still manage to handle that...

I also prefer clear intelligible commands to a zillion key bindings.
I prefer writing, say, \alpha in LaTeX, than Control+Shift+Meta+Whatever+a,
or something, is some formula editor might provide as a "shortcut" 
(the term implies flawed design) alternative to mousing. The LaTeX
command is very intelligible; that key sequence isn't.

> correct for you because you know latex. the other way round for me because
> I know groff. what kind of criterion is that?  

I could understand much of LaTeX source without knowing any LaTeX. 
Not so with *roff (or plain-TeX, for the matter... any many Wiki
markups are quite awful too).

> beauty is in the eye of the beholder... 

And I prefer uninterrupted text that looks like a document with some
commands in it, to what looks like a session in some archaic cryptic
shell...

> I'd rather get a mutt-like _comprehensive_ user manual which contrary to the
> above idea would stay useful even for the permanent ion3-user. the kind of
> really basic interactive tutorial, which seems to be more the intent as I now
> see, probably will be used (and be useful) only at the very first day of using ion3.
> that's a waste of effort in my view.

I prefer the simple statusbar help screen...

> so, please stay at least  with 'man/ groff -man' (but why that in contrast
> to `groff -ms' is tolerable remains obscure to me), 

Because it provides something that other formats do not provide: 
compatibility with the man system. I'm sure there's something that
can provide `catman` output for less etc. from HTML, and thus from
various other source formats.

-- 
Tuomo