Re: does (setq Man-switches "-a") work?

[Emanuel Berg]

Omar Polo wrote:

> man(1) will exec less(1) (or more, or most,
> or ...) to "page" the result.

Yes, of course.

> If I've understood correctly, emacs itself is
> acting as a pager in this case paging the
> result from man.

Yes.

> Having the headline for man(1) "Manual pager
> utils" doesn't help, it's misleading in my
> opinion. OpenBSD' manpage is a bit cleaner
> maybe:
>
> $ man man
>
> MAN(1) General Commands Manual MAN(1)

The Linux (Debian) headline is better in the
sense it mentions "Manual" first, not
"General Commands" which can mean anything,
also it calls it "pager" which is good so
people can identify it easily, the third word
"utils" is good because that's what it is.

But... what is a "General Commands Manual"?
It is like something one would find in a trench
on top of a smashed MBT-70, and then one would
think, hey, maybe the CIA came up with the most
bland title, so they could put state secrets in
it, and still be sure no one would ever read
it...

>> What's pager?
>
> a program that "pages" something
> (text generally.)

Yes, of course, but here "pager" doesn't refer
to just any pager but a specific a program, or
actually a symbolic link:

$ t pager # [1]
/usr/bin/pager
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 23 Mar 18  2016 /usr/bin/pager -> /etc/alternatives/pager
 * links to: /bin/less 
             -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 148K Mar  5  2016 /bin/less

This (/usr/bin/pager) is maybe a Linux or
Debian thing (?), it isn't on OpenBSD anyway.


[1] https://dataswamp.org/~incal/conf/.zsh/ide (line 67)

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