More on "man" and editors

[lark@world.std.com (Lar Kaufman)]

For those on the list who are bored with this, I apologize, but hopefully
this is useful to some...

Following is a sample output from my Internet host system's manpage set
(the host is a Silicon Graphics Indigo running Irix, a System V Unix 
enriched with BSD utilities--and a lot of freeware and shareware, in this
case).  I ran the command "man -k editor" to get this output...
 - - -
a.out (4)               - assembler and link editor output
abild (1)               - ABI link editor
bitmap, bmtoa, atobm (1)- bitmap editor and converter utilities for the X Window System
ed, red (1)             - text editor
edit (1)                - text editor (variant of ex for casual users)
editres (1)             - a dynamic resource editor for X Toolkit applications
eep v1.6 (1)            -- Easy Editor Program for .newsrc
elvis, ex, vi, view, input (1)- The editor
ex (1)                  - text editor
ex, vi, view (1)        - text editors
ieditor (1)             - a simple internationalized mouse-based text editor
imged (1)               - small image editor
joe (1)                 - Joe's Own Editor
joe (1)                 - Joe's Own Editor
jot, jotxgizmo (1)      - mouse-based text editor
jove (1)                - an interactive display-oriented text editor
ld (1)                  - link editor
pico (1)                - simple text editor in the style of the Pine Composer
prompter (1)            - prompting editor front-end for MH
SceneViewer (1)         - 3d editor and viewer for Inventor scenes
sed (1)                 - stream editor
te (1)                  - TECO text editor
TEACHJOVE (1)           - learn how to use the JOVE editor
vi, view, vedit (1)     - screen-oriented (visual) display editors based on ex
vim (1)                 - Vi IMproved, a programmers text editor
webmagic (1)            - WYSIWYG HTML editor
xedit (1)               - simple text editor for X
zshzle (1)              - zsh command line editor

 - - -
Note that if I had looked for "ex" I would have picked up a huge amount of
listings including things like "hex" and "text" and so on.  So if looking
for the "ex" editor I would have entered 'man -k " ex "' (the double-quotes
are literal here, making the search look for <blank>ex<blank> string.)

If the whatis database is not built on the system, you won't find anything,
of course.  

Next couple of messages are manpages for vi, vile, elvis, etc. which you
should ignore if you have no interest in them.  But you might be interested
in the powers of unix filtering... I created the output for elvis, for 
example, by entering "man elvis | col -b > elvis.out".  By piping the 
manpage through the "col" command with the "-b" flag, I stripped the 
backspaced/overwritten characters in the file that would have been understood
by an original unix pager, but not by many modern email browsers....

 -lar
"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around. No
time for dancing or lovey-dovey, I ain't got time for that now. I sent a
message through the receiver, hope to get an answer someday. Why stay in
college? Why go to night school? Thought I'd be different this time." -D. Byrne