Problem with macports install, any help greatly appreciated

[joseph davison]

For the unix-geek, there is nothing wrong with man(1).  I've been using it for nearly 40 years and am happy to have it on MacOS X.

On the other hand, Mr. Essam is unfamiliar with Terminal.app, and will therefore find man(1) less than useful.

When I install Manopen, I also install openman, the cli interface.  In fact, the way I most often use Manopen is via openman.   It has the advantage, on this modern machine, of delivering the manpage in a new window, with hyperlinks to "See also" items, each of which also open in their own windows.   If I use man, I either need to open a second terminal window so I can read about the command while I'm trying out the parameters, or run man, quit it, try something, forget what the options were, rerun man...  

If the manpage  you're looking at is bash(1) for instance, or some other humongous dissertation, it's hard to keep it all in one's head at one time -- especially after 40 years of command line use, where the available local memory space has begun to decline, and one needs to make more use of auxiliary memory.

-- 
 joe
 joda at ieee.org

On Jun 14, 2010, at 11:05 AM, Scott Haneda wrote:

> On Jun 14, 2010, at 6:44 AM, joseph davison <jwdavison at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> One thing that might be useful is
>> sudo install manopen
>> 
>> That will install a tool that lets you read "man[ual] pages" easily for the unix-y tools installed on your system.
>> Many programs (probably including gimp -- I haven't tried it) that come from the unix world are / were  documented using "man pages", and this lets you read them.
> 
> I must have missed a thread, but what is wrong with the built in 'man' that is available to all Mac OS X installs.
> 
> As far as I remember, 'man' has been with us since the 10.0 days.
> 
>> Once it's installed you can read the manpage for ports, for instance -- (although that may be like trying to drink from a firehose).   Still it shows you one way to find what other programs are available.
> 
> If 'man' doesn't work now, I would suspect a second copy may also not work.
> 
> How come the built-in is not acceptable for this user?
> 
> -- Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ * (Sent from a mobile device)