Help requested for Ubuntu Brainstorm response on "man" usability

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 12:03:47PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> One of the most popular topics in brainstorm at present is the
> usability of "man", in particular about making it more clear how to
> quit it:
> 
>   http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25975/
> 
> As you are a expert for "man", it would be great if you could give a
> thorough analysis of the current status quo and investigate how the
> 'q' key and the available help in general could become more
> discoverable.

I have made a suitable change upstream to address this, and marked the
Brainstorm idea as implemented.  Here's a copy of the developer comments
I added on Brainstorm:

  Thanks for the idea! By sheer coincidence, a similar thought had
  occurred to me just a day or two ago when showing my stepson how to
  read manual pages.

  I've made a change upstream for man-db 2.6.0 which will address this,
  by adding "(press h for help or q to quit)" to the default prompt
  string which is displayed on the bottom line of the screen when
  reading manual pages. I think this is a reasonable balance between
  providing guidance and taking up too much screen space, and people who
  get fed up of seeing it can always follow the documentation in man(1)
  for customising the prompt.

  This will probably not be in Ubuntu 11.04, because I still have to go
  through a round of translations before releasing man-db 2.6.0, and it
  will be getting rather late by that point. However, it will definitely
  be in Ubuntu 11.10.

   -- Colin Watson (Ubuntu developer and upstream maintainer of man-db)

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]