Re: RE: [PATCH] (woman-always-choose-first-hit): New defcustom.

[xahlee]

the number of times i tried to use WoMan as a replacement of unix's
“man” utility, but i find it unusable. Here's some problems i encountered:

• I had aliased “man” to “woman”, but noticed that sometimes when i type “M-x man” it still calls “man” despite this. (haven't looked into what causes this or how this happens)

• When calling “woman”, it takes some 3 secs to start up. (probably only happen when called first time in a session) On the other hand, “man” starts right away without this delay.
(The message is: “Building list of manual directory expansions...”,
“Building completion list of all manual topics...”)

• often “woman” will prompt me to make a choice. Very annoying. From my experiences in unix using in the past 10 years, maybe once a year when “man” didn't make the right choice. (hopefully the patch in this thread fixes this)

• another flaw, perhaps reasonable, is that “woman” does not work for some “man” pages. e.g. recently i was trying to do “woman” on “killall” on OS X 10.4.x, and it returns
“.Dd June 25, 1995
.Os
.Dt KILLALL 1
.Sh NAME
.Nm killall
...”

The advantage to me for using “woman” is that it does syntax coloring. Possibly “man” can do too but i have not explored.

  Xah

☄