Re: alternative "info" reader (was: kernel makeoptions)

[Magnus Eriksson <magetoo%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

On Sun, 27 Feb 2011, Thomas Dickey wrote:

> Thinking about it, there's little evidence that either info or manpages are 
> superior to each other, while the ability to translate to html seems to imply 
> that html is at least more malleable.

As a non-tangent, the previously mentioned pinfo reads man pages too, with 
hyperlinks where appropriate.  That got me thinking; it would be nice to 
have a standard tool (with a liberal license) that would read all these 
formats, ideally with the ability to switch between several open tabs 
since you often are reading a bunch of man pages at the same time...

Of course, there is such a tool, and it's called a "web browser".  (And 
Gnome has a special documentation browser, right?)  Seems like having 
something serving pages from http://localhost/ would be a useful standard 
component of a modern Unix system, along with something like lynx/links.


I used Debian for a while, and one of the greatest joys after switching 
(back) to NetBSD was suddenly having (gasp!) _actual man pages_ for the 
tools and parts of the operating system I was using, so I'm not arguing 
for an alternative to man pages or anything.  Just thinking out loud.


MAgnus