* On 2023 22 Jul 14:22 -0500, Bjarni Ingi Gislason wrote: > The text "SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR" is output twice in the header, > is once not enough and why? (Is this necessary(?))
On a terminal or PDF form read on a monitor, once is certainly enough. My limited understanding of manual pages is that the format was the result of the intent of binding the man output into a printed manual. As each page likely would be rendered independently before binding, it seems probable that the thought was to have the command name next to each margin so that those thumbing through the printed manual could easily find the command they were looking for. This seems to make sense as each page could begin on either the front of back side of a sheet of paper in the bound manual. Consistency is probably the only reason the convention was carried over to video display terminals. Also, commands back then were short--5 or 6 characters at most. Something like "SENSIBLE-TERMINAL-EMULATOR" was almost certainly not anticipated at the inception of man pages. Why it has carried forward all of these years can likely be attributed to double headings often not being a problem and due to a lot of care for backward compatibility in the Free Software projects since their inception. Fortunately, old tools like *roff are getting some fresh looks and the compatibility with historic systems is now being questioned to an extent. Compatibility with older Unix and older conventions in the Linux world is likely not as high of a priority as it once was although I am impressed that Branden takes care to test Groff against old documents. Certainly this convention and the forced upper casing of commands in the heading can be revisited by developers, distributors, and users. - Nate -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Web: https://www.n0nb.us Projects: https://github.com/N0NB GPG fingerprint: 82D6 4F6B 0E67 CD41 F689 BBA6 FB2C 5130 D55A 8819
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