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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation.

If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.

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> If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu [...]

My goodness. Man was written on a paper teletype.

And since man pages could take minutes to print out, if you needed one you'd tear that section of paper off and keep it in a binder for future (and faster) reference.

So? That didn't stop `man -a`.

Or a minor alteration to an existing program to support a good suggestion.

Why is it that the Rust community thinks that the solution to every flaw in an application is a rewrite in Rust?

It might be more helpful to write a Rust-based snark detector first.

Could be, but I don't think so in this case given a cursory review of the parent poster's history.

Programs these old are controlled by people who are very strongly opposed to change, even if it improves things. They like living in the 80s.

I absolutely guarantee if you propose this change the the GNU neckbeards who control man they will come up with some bullshit technical reason why it can't be done.

> even if it improves things.

odds are, it doesn't.

Exactly the sort of response I would expect to this very clear improvement.

GNU has its own documentation format called 'info'.

Because it might be the only way to introduce new vulnerabilities. See Ubuntu.

>If man was designed by someone with any taste at all

man was designed at a time you likely can't conceive of.

Can you even imagine designing something that's being actively used and talked about a HALF CENTURY later?

There are a multitude of manpagers and viewers and frontends. It's one of those things you can write yourself very easily.

Any that have this feature? I did try batman but it only replaces the pager; not the man frontend which is where this change would need to happen.

Not that I know of, but I haven't looked. I have written a similar program for pulling arm64 instruction pages (which have many duplicates), the whole thing is under 100 lines, and most of that is printing and file IO that would be handled by the manpager, the actual finding dups and presenting a menu is even simpler.

It seems it has been done already a while ago without waiting for the rust community to do their usual churn.

https://imgur.com/a/kEkmRxx (link shows a screenshot of khelpcenter showing the different manpages available for crontab)

Really? I can't see your image (thanks UK government) but if I type `man crontab` in a recent Ubuntu it just shows crontab(1).

He said "khelpcenter", not "man".

Ok well we were discussing man, not khelpcenter, so that seems irrelevant...

We were discussing replacing man, so a replacement that does as requested is very relevant.

I hope this was just some over the top sarcasm.

No of course not. Why do you hope that?

It does that, depending on implementation.

> Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.

And maybe we need some versions: man version 1, man version 2 and so on. And of course, in the style of GTK, each one incompatible with all the others. Progress. /s

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