Re: WoMan: a few suggestions

[Dr Francis J. Wright]

Thanks for your comments.  I'll give them some thought when I have time to
work on WoMan again.  One quick suggestion that might help is to use either
the woman-dired-find-file or woman-find-file command rather than woman.
Essentially all that the woman command does is provide a completing
topic-based interface, and the caching is there only to speed up the topic
completion.  All 3 commands are predefined (in GNU Emacs 21) to autoload the
woman library.

Francis

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Klaus Zeitler" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Cc: <address@hidden>
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 11:18 AM
Subject: WoMan: a few suggestions


>
> emacs is like real life, you discover a WoMan and problems arise :-).
>
> On my workstation WoMan takes about 2 and a half minutes to
> build its internal data structure (long MANPATH I know).
> Currently WoMan decides when to rebuild the cache, e.g. MANPATH changes.
> Unfortunately, since we're working here under ClearCase, the MANPATH
> changes quite often, though this hardly ever matters for most of the man
pages.
> I'd like to have a possibility to regenerate the cache only on demand.
> (My current solution is a new variable
woman-dont-update-cache-automatically
> and I've advised woman-read-directory-cache)
>
> I'd like to have the code in woman-file-name that generates the data
structures
> split in a separate "interactive" function.
> Now I recreate the cache once a day via a cron job.
>
> I wonder if the completion mechanism makes much sense. Almost always I get
> just a "/" in the minibuffer and have to select from the completion buffer
> (that's because we have many man pages under /usr and /opt). My guess is
> that more than 90% of the time a user just wants the first man page that
> is found in the search path (same behavior as if one calls man directly).
> Therefore maybe it'd be better if WoMan would show the minibuffer e.g. for
> the ls command like: "Manual file (/usr/man/sman1/ls.1): ".
> Now the user can just press enter to select this man page and in case he
> wants to see other man directories for this command he can press "?".
>
> Klaus
>
> -- 
>  ------------------------------------------
> |  Klaus Zeitler      Lucent Technologies  |
> |  Email:             address@hidden  |
>  ------------------------------------------
> ---
> Imagination is the one weapon in the war
> against reality.    -- Jules de Gaultier
>