Splitting the man page (was: Re: [MEncoder-users] aac encoding with lavc)

[Nicolas George]

Le septidi 7 vendémiaire, an CCXV, Rich Felker a écrit :
> This has come up many times before and I'm STRONGLY against splitting
> the man page. Having it all in one file makes it trivial to find
> anything you want with the / key. Multiple files means you have to go
> back and forth between multiple man commands. The only people who
> benefit from splitting it are people too stupid to learn to use their
> pager...

I beg to differ: searching globally something is indeed easier, but it is
not the most common searching task. I believe it is much more common to
search something in a certain context. For example, when searching in the
-lavcopts arguments, it is always a pain to see if one has not yet reached
the section for -xvidencopts.

About huge man pages, I would suggest to take a look at one that beats
mplayer's on a 3-to-1 basis: zsh. There is a thematic split (builtins,
expansion, modules, etc.), and a zshall man page that includes them all, to
allow global searching. I can tell it is really practical.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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