My previous message, about Perldoc, reminded me of the long-forgotten
time when I actually wrote Perl under MSWin, and that reminded me:
I have/had some magic thingy under MSWin to make Perldoc by default save
output to an RTF temp file and then open Wordpad (as write.exe) on it as
a lightweight viewer. (Hm, this:
http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Pod-Perldoc/lib/Pod/Perldoc/ToRtf.pm
says that it was simply "set PERLDOC=-ortf")
Anyway, in those ancient days, there were still lots of people running
around with write.exe copies that couldn't understand RTF or something,
but now, years later, I think that that magic open-with-Wordpad behavior
should be the default-- or at least default if Perldoc somehow sees that
it's running under XP.
I'm not sure how Cygwin should relate to this.
And I'm not adverse to having the default be to save to HTML and opening
the temp file with a browser. The distinction between opening an RTF
temp file in a little Write window and opening an HTML file in the
default browser, seems quite minor to me now.
(Of course, the default would be merely a default, easily overrideable
with -otext either in the PERLDOC env var or just on the command line;
just in case someone particularly wants to joyously page thru plaintext,
for some purpose.)
The most recent pondering I can find of this, is this message of mine
from years ago:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.pod-people/700
and the ten or so messages that follow it.
You will note the extreme datedness of the considerations there,
including, notably, the once-important idea of: what if I don't have a
browser open, and don't want to wait foreeeever for it to start up?
