More on "man" and editors

More on "man" and editors

[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

Re: More on "man" and editors

[Charles Hallenbeck]

Lar --
Thank you for those interesting observations and for the documentation.
I appreciate the "instant education" this list is providing.


Chuck -- Second Sight Software
Now using Linux and PINE

Re: More on "man" and editors

[T.Pospisek's MailLists]

On Thu, 17 Dec 1998, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:

> Lar --
> Thank you for those interesting observations and for the documentation.
> I appreciate the "instant education" this list is providing.

But is it >really< necessary to post all the man pages to the list when
all it takes is either a private email or something like:

  please type "man vi" at the promt

Please consider that:

a) people are paying for their bandwidth/internet connection
b) there are >many< places to inform yourself about these things not least
   of which are various linux/unix newbie lists.

*
t

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Tomas Pospisek - Freelance: Linuxing, Networking
                      http://spin.ch/~tpo/freelance
         www.SPIN.ch - Internet Services in Graubuenden/Switzerland
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: More on "man" and editors

[Charles Hallenbeck]

On Fri, 18 Dec 1998, Lar Kaufman wrote:

> 
> Did you notice that one of the editors in that list was designed to
> work like your PINE interface?

Yes. That was a neat list. As it happenes I already had the vim and elvis
man pages available, but it is still puzzling why the vi and ex man pages
were not already on my system. I have been working with computers for 30
years or so, but believe it or not am just now working with a unix (linux)
directly.  Chuck -- Second Sight Software Now using Linux and PINE

Re: More on "man" and editors

[Lar Kaufman]

I imagine that a number of enhanced freeware implementations of standard
Unix utilities are without standard manpages.  A good resource would 
probably be the last public Berkeley Standard Distribution manpages.  
Because these are distributed under the Berkeley license (allowing free
reproduction and distribution for non-commercial use only, but requiring
licensing for commercial distribution) they are omitted from commercial
packages and also from standard FSF-oriented sites, who prefer to only
allow Copyleft distribution under the GNU Public License.  But the BSD
manpages can be found on various archive sites.  I don't have a specific
site at hand, but if nobody else does I'll dig one up...

 -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

Re: More on "man" and editors

[wlestes]

have a look at the following:

ftp.ocf.berkeley.edu:/pub/Library/Computer
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/index.html

for the 2nd address, i find wget or similar tools to be of great
help in fetching large numbers of pages.

> I imagine that a number of enhanced freeware implementations of standard
> Unix utilities are without standard manpages.  A good resource would 
> probably be the last public Berkeley Standard Distribution manpages.  
> Because these are distributed under the Berkeley license (allowing free
> reproduction and distribution for non-commercial use only, but requiring
> licensing for commercial distribution) they are omitted from commercial
> packages and also from standard FSF-oriented sites, who prefer to only
> allow Copyleft distribution under the GNU Public License.  But the BSD
> manpages can be found on various archive sites.  I don't have a specific
> site at hand, but if nobody else does I'll dig one up...

Re: More on "man" and editors

[wlestes]

I thought the following reply might be of general interest so I am
sending it to blinux-list as well.

> I noticed your message on Blinux-list, and have an interest in those
> classic BSD manuals available at ftp.ocf.edu/pub/Library/Computer/
> 
> There appear to be two copies: the Unix programmer's manual and the 4.3
> bsd version. Which is more up to date? Also, does there exist a compressed
> tar archive of the entire documentation set? This material seems slightly
> more up to date than the Bell Labs documents.

for compressed tar archives, many ftp sites allow one to do

get dir.tar.gz

which will tar and compress the directory dir on the fly so you get a
file dir.tar.gz which contains the contents of dir.

If the particular site does not allow such get commands--the symptom
is usually "dir.tar.gz: no such file" or similarly worded
messages--you can use tools like ncftp which have a recursive get
command. also, wget can fetch http and ftp documents and wget also can
fetch directories recursively.

wget can be had from your favorite GNU dealership and ncftp comes
shipped with redhat and maybe other distributions. if you cant find
it, i'd check sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux

I'm not sure which of the two sets is more up to date. if memory
serves, i fetched both and they sit on my harddrive at home. I just
tried to check at ocf, but for some reason could not get a directory
listing.

best of luck.

--will