Xah Lee, 2009-03-11
Emacs has a “man” command, that let users to display unix documentation called “man page”. However, it does not do syntax coloring. Emacs has a elisp version called “woman”, that does syntax coloring. However, there are some major usability problems for it to replace emacs's “man” command. (emacs's “man” is a elisp wrapper that calls the unix “man” utility, while “woman” is written in elisp entirely.)
• I had aliased “man” to “woman”, but noticed that sometimes when i type “M-x man” it still calls emacs's “man” despite this. (haven't looked into what causes this or how this happens)
• When calling “woman”, it takes some 3 secs to start up. (probably only happen when called first time in a session) In contrast, “man” starts right away without this delay. (The mini buffer message is: “Building list of manual directory expansions...”, “Building completion list of all manual topics...”)
• Often “woman” will prompt me to make a choice among man pages of the same name found in different man paths. Very annoying. From my experiences in unix using in the past 10 years, maybe only once a year that “man” didn't make the right choice.
• Another flaw, perhaps reasonable, is that “woman” does not work for some “man” pages. For example, type “Alt+x woman Enter killall”, on OS X 10.4.x, and the display returned start with:
“.Dd June 25, 1995 .Os .Dt KILLALL 1 .Sh NAME .Nm killall ...”
Emacs should fix the above problems. And, perhaps alias “man” to “woman” by default. The goal is that emacs simply provides a command to read unix manual pages, without user having to know the tech details about “man” and “woman”. When “woman” detects a man page in a format it cannot read, automatically launch “man” instead.
Eli Zaretskii wrote:
The problems you mention are a far cry from making WoMan “unusable”.
“unusable” is probably a exaggeration. I'm trying to express how it is unusable to most users who are not emacs enthusiasts.
Consider emacs as a tool, and likewise man and woman are tools. People want to run man/woman mostly to get the job done, namely, reading unix man page in emacs. “man” works. However, woman is a improvement, but isn't default. The extra option of minor improvement to user adds a slight complexity. But adding the fact that woman itself provides some rough edges. So for some emacs user who are beginning to be adventurous, when they read about woman and try it, its problem is frustrating, another tiny time drain in emacs.
Each thing individually are trivial problems, but emacs with so many unusual streaks, terminologies, keyboard shortcut notation, unusual undo, etc, earns emacs the steep learning curve and drive away most professional programers.
I think most, or all of these can be fixed, without sacrificing ANY of emacs's power.
Back to the particular case of woman... for example, i think that:
• Man and woman should be merged, in the sense that user are taught one single command “man” to read unix manual page. This can possibly be done by aliasing man to woman, and:
• The onset delay of woman can certainly be minimized, perhaps by looking into ways to optimize, cache, or done after the first call of woman, in the background. (e.g. when user is not typing actively) (so that, at the second call of woman in a session, name completion feature is there, transparently) Here, i think caching it under “~/.emacs.d/” is probably a very good solution.
• When woman detect a page it cannot read, launch man.
• Eliminate the fact that woman prompt user to make a choice. (which i think this thread's patch fixes)
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-03/msg00186.html.
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