From owner-freebsd-current Wed Sep 6 00:12:55 1995 Return-Path: current-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id AAA03968 for current-outgoing; Wed, 6 Sep 1995 00:12:55 -0700 Received: from localhost.lightside.com (user38.lightside.com [198.81.209.38]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id AAA03961 for ; Wed, 6 Sep 1995 00:12:53 -0700 Received: (from jehamby@localhost) by localhost.lightside.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id AAA00453; Wed, 6 Sep 1995 00:13:01 -0700 Date: Wed, 6 Sep 1995 00:13:00 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby X-Sender: jehamby@localhost To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: current@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: lynx in /usr/src/usr.bin/lynx; any objections? In-Reply-To: <558.810151918@time.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: current-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sun, 3 Sep 1995, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > We need a documentation browser for handling local copies of the HTML > docs. The GNU `info' utility is nice for reading info files, but > that's *all* it's good for and it appears that HTML has "won" this > particular battle anyway. If we had lynx as a standard part of the > system, any utility wanting to "bring up a help screen" would be able > to count on having lynx around on the standard system for displaying > ... > Any strong objections? Any strong agreement? > > Jordan Great idea! Lynx is easy to use, and the only decent Unix web browser that doesn't require X (and since it's impossible to start up X until AFTER you've finished installing, having a text-mode browser would be very useful for sysinstall). As for your idea about having a universal info reader, it should be a shell script with the Web browser defined at the top so users can change it to (for example) Netscape once they have X going. Don't forget the fact that there isn't a decent X-based reader for info files (unless you count Emacs) and the keyboard commands for info can be awkward to use, especially for new users. Finally, the Linuxdoc SGML format makes an excellent wrapper for manuals that need automatic indexing and such. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jake Hamby | E-Mail: jehamby@lightside.com Student, Cal Poly University, Pomona | System Administrator, JPL -------------------------------------------------------------------------------