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

[xahlee]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> • The problems you mention are a far cry from making WoMan ``unusable''.

“unusable” is probably a exaggeration. I'm trying to express how it is unusable to most users who are not emacs enthusiasts.

consider emacs as a tool, and likewise man and woman are tools. People want to run man/woman mostly to get the job done, namely, reading unix man page in emacs. “man” works. However, woman is a improvement, but isn't default. The extra option of minor improvement to user adds a slight complexity. But adding the fact that woman itself provides some rough edges. So for some emacs user who are beginning to be adventurous, when they read about woman and try it, its problem is frustrating, another tiny time drain in emacs.

Each thing individually are trivial problems, but emacs with so many unusual streaks, terminologies, keyboard shortcut notation, unusual undo, etc, earns emacs the steep learning curve and drive away most professional programers.

I think most, or all of these can be fixed, without sacrificing ANY of emacs's power.

back to the particular case of woman... for example, i think that:

• man and woman should be merged, in the sense that user are taught one single command “man” to read unix manual page. This can possibly be done by aliasing man to woman, and:

• the onset delay of woman can certainly be minimized, perhaps by looking into ways to optimize, cache, or done after the first call of woman, in the background. (e.g. when user is not typing actively) (so that, at the second call of woman in a session, name completion feature is there, transparently) Here, i think caching it under “~/.emacs.d/” is probably a very good solution.

• when woman detect a page it cannot read, launch man.

• eliminate the fact that woman prompt user to make a choice. (which i think this thread's patch fixes)

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

------------------------------
> [aliasing man to woman sometimes doesn't work]
> How's that a problem with WoMan?
> And then does the same after you type RET.  The advantage of WoMan
>  is that it offers you completion for man-page names, while `man'
>  doesn't.
> And why do you think `man' doesn't have such problems, sometimes?
>  It all depends on the troff back-end you have installed vs the man
>  pages.

On Mar 11, 2009 9:13pm, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:08:09 +0000
> From: address@hidden
> Cc:
>
> 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:

The problems you mention are a far cry from making WoMan ``unusable''.

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

How's that a problem with WoMan?

> • When calling “woman”, it takes some 3 secs to start up.

What kind of a CPU do you have?  Here it takes 1 second.

> (probably only happen when called first time in a session)

Yes.

> On the other hand, “man” starts right away without this delay.

And then does the same after you type RET.  The advantage of WoMan is
that it offers you completion for man-page names, while `man' doesn't.

> • another flaw, perhaps reasonable, is that “woman” does not work for some
> “man” pages. eg 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
> ...”

And why do you think `man' doesn't have such problems, sometimes?  It
all depends on the troff back-end you have installed vs the man pages.