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Say what program does in man page NAME section #457

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jidanni opened this issue Nov 23, 2023 · 2 comments
Closed

Say what program does in man page NAME section #457

jidanni opened this issue Nov 23, 2023 · 2 comments

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@jidanni
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jidanni commented Nov 23, 2023

Here we are looking around for terminal-related programs.

$ apropos -s 1 terminal
clear (1)            - clear the terminal screen
grotty (1)           - groff output driver for typewriter-like (terminal)...
luit (1)             - Locale and ISO 2022 support for Unicode terminals
more (1)             - display the contents of a file in a terminal
namei (1)            - follow a pathname until a terminal point is found
neqn (1)             - format equations for character-cell terminal output
nroff (1)            - format documents with groff for TTY (terminal) dev...
reset (1)            - initialize or reset terminal state
script (1)           - make typescript of terminal session
sensible-terminal (1) - sensible terminal emulator
...

We miss out on less. Why? because

less - opposite of more

even on the Posix man page.

Sounded clever back then, but what if every man page did that? apropos(1) would
then be filled with "A is the opposite of B" and "C is an improved
version of D"... But one day when users are not familiar anymore with B
and D, it doesn't make sense.

So please fix the NAME field, so at least in apropos(1) it also just says

less (1) - display the contents of a file in a terminal

@polluks
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polluks commented Nov 27, 2023

Well, less is a true veteran, not any wannabe tool.

@gwsw
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gwsw commented Nov 30, 2023

I agree, the "opposite of more" joke was lame and unhelpful 40 years ago; even more so today.
Fixed in 01fb371.

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