Re: Where is my editor?

[doug dougwellington . com]

Sorry for the off-topic reply, but the mention of OpenBSD took me back.  I 
probably have a dozen OpenBSD shirts.  (I doubt I can fit in them anymore LOL!) 
 I have a pile of CDs of OpenBSD and FreeBSD releases.  When I started my last 
job in 2000, the first thing I did was fix the company email server.  I ran 
FreeBSD with Postfix on a Compaq rack mount server.  (So much easier than 
sendmail.cf!)  I had an uptime of over three years at one point.  Boy are those 
days gone.

I just received a copy of Kernighan's Unix A History and a Memoir.  While I 
knew most of the stories already, it was fun to see some pictures I hadn't seen 
before, and reading it took me back to those heady Doctor Dobb's and 
Microcornucopia days of my computer career youth...

From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington@nongnu.org 
 on behalf of Andy 
Bradford 
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2024 7:28 AM
To: Robert Elz 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Where is my editor?

Thus said Robert Elz on Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:10:26 +0700:

> Yes, I have had the "editor" line in my profile since MH days, (I have
> been a user since  almost forever) so what nmh did  as default I never
> knew, which is why I avoided saying that...

>From looking  at the past sources  it used to  use a C macro  defined in
h/nmh.h:

#define DEFAULT_EDITOR "vi"

I'm  curious  now  how  many  installations   of  nmh  do  not  have  vi
available... that being said, I do know Linux based OS developers make a
lot  of strange  decisions  about what  is  in the  "base"  OS, so  it's
entirely possible that vi may not exist in some flavors of Linux.

How  many non-POSIX  systems is  nmh running  on?


> I hope it is back working like you expected it now.

It is now, thanks.  I was able to figure out that EOT  was what ended my
experience with prompter  and changed the default  editor in .mh_profile
and then I  could just use "edit  vi" at the "What  now?" prompt. That's
how  I  composed my  original  email  starting  this thread.  It  wasn't
completely foreign  (being a long-time Unix  user I assumed it  was just
reading stdin and EOT would end it), just unexpected.

I suppose I could set EDITOR but I've never had to on OpenBSD.

Andy

Re: Macintosh for nmh?

[doug dougwellington . com]

Among other things, I was a computer security guy, and almost universally, we 
used Windows phones.  See how that turned out, eh?  My motorcycle and car 
management software and several of my CAD and 3D programs only ran on Windows 
for years (some are still that way), so I was actually pretty content with that 
ecosystem and will never completely escape.  I suspect that if I had actually 
bought completely into it and started dealing with email with Outlook (the real 
one, not the web-based version), I wouldn't be in the spot I am now.

Instead, I left everything on the GoDaddy IMAP servers, which actually made it 
easy to access from all devices, but now my allocation is full and I've got to 
find a new direction.  Web Outlook is pretty limited (e.g. you can only move or 
delete 75 messages at a time), so it's really getting in my way.  I'm retired 
now, so I don't need to access my email while on TDY, so I'm planning to pull 
everything down onto my local computer.

Think I'll check out Macs the next time I'm at Costco.

From: Ken Hornstein 
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2023 4:07 PM
To: doug dougwellington.com 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Macintosh for nmh?

>I've had a hate, love, hate, love, hate relationship with Apple over
>the years.  I think the pendulum is swinging the other way back towards
>love, LOL!

I am sure my perspective is skewed by buying into the Apple ecosystem;
the automatic syncing between devices, little things like replying to
text messages on your desktop, all make things much smoother.

>How are you getting your email onto your Mac?

I use 'inc' to a POP server.  I admit this doesn't play so well if you
want to use IMAP with other devices.

--Ken

Re: Macintosh for nmh?

[doug dougwellington . com]

I think I know what you're saying.  Unix/Linux is an absolutely open toolkit 
that lets you do anything you want.  The downside is that you pretty much HAVE 
to do anything you want...

I've had a hate, love, hate, love, hate relationship with Apple over the years. 
 I think the pendulum is swinging the other way back towards love, LOL!

How are you getting your email onto your Mac?

Doug

From: Ken Hornstein 
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2023 2:08 PM
To: doug dougwellington.com 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Macintosh for nmh?

>I have an old linux desktop that I'm sure would work, but I'm wondering
>if I should consider buying a new Apple laptop.  Last time I used a Mac,
>it was mostly tolerable for an old UNIX head like me.  Are there any
>issues running nmh on a Mac?

I'm typing this from a Mac right now (well, via exmh, but I still use
bare nmh a lot).  exmh has some challenges relating to fonts, of all
things, but bare nmh works perfectly fine.  Nmh is a package in
Homebrew (I think the best open-source packaging system for MacOS X)
and I expect it to be well-supported in the future.

I view the issue of "Mac vs Linux" mostly as a philosophical one.  Yes,
there's a lot of Unix under the hood and as a fellow old UNIX head I
make great use of that.  The upside for me is there's a lot of support
for "mass market" kind of stuff and you don't have to fiddle with things
a lot as you might have to do under Linux.  The downside is that there
is still some hidden magic so it's not 100% Unix everywhere and it's not
as customizable as a pure Linux system; you have to be happy with (or at
least be willing to live with) some of the decisions Apple has made for
you.  At this point in my life I find someone else making a bunch of
those decisions for me to be relieving; I am sure that plenty of people
would find it stifling.

--Ken

Macintosh for nmh?

[doug dougwellington . com]

Hi folks,

I use GoDaddy for email.  Their old webmail system was tolerable, but a while 
back they must have signed a deal with Microsoft, so everything got switched to 
Office.  I have reached the end of my tolerance for it and now plan to switch 
everything to something like offlineimap and nmh.

I have an old linux desktop that I'm sure would work, but I'm wondering if I 
should consider buying a new Apple laptop.  Last time I used a Mac, it was 
mostly tolerable for an old UNIX head like me.  Are there any issues running 
nmh on a Mac?

Or should I forget the Mac and upgrade my Linux box?

Thanks, and Happy New Year,
Doug

Re: Calendaring?

[doug dougwellington . com]

I appreciate that.  I spent the first 20+ years of my career as a system and 
network administrator, so I'm a hopeless vi guy.  I tried to learn Emacs 
several times over the years, with no joy.  (Obscure pun?)  I was too 
impatient.  "I know how to do this with vim, don't have time to learn a 
different way."  Definitely system admin land.  If I had started as a 
programmer, I'd probably be an Emacs user.  This might be an odd comparison, 
but it's like Python vs. Java to me.  Python is small, relatively fast, good 
libraries, etc., whereas Java takes a while to instantiate and has all kinds of 
amazing tools and languages in its ecosystem.

We also tried Eclipse for a while, tried to turn it into the front end for our 
processing framework, but talk about the opposite philosophy of the Unix 
ethic...

From: nmh-work...@jugra.de  on behalf of Juri Grabowski 

Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2023 11:32 PM
To: doug dougwellington.com 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Calendaring?

Hello,

maybe you should look in direction of org-mode with emacs. I'm short
here, but it's a lot of documentation on it.

Best Regards,
Juri Grabowski

Re: Calendaring?

[doug dougwellington . com]

Technically inclined?  It's funny, I feel like such the dinosaur.  I was a VAX 
VMS sysadmin and then got into Sun, SGI, Data General, Evans & Sutherland, HP, 
etc.  Linux killed all that stuff off, so I spent the last twenty years 
managing Linux servers and writing code, mostly Python with some Node.  I 
retired a couple ago because of Mr. Biden's vaccine mandate, so I haven't 
actually written any code since then.  Feels weird.

Anyway, I'm probably going to implement a local store on my Linux server.  I'll 
keep it under Git and have copies across multiple disks.  I have a couple 
different service providers, so I'll probably start by syncing a read-only copy 
to one of them so I can access the info when I'm not home.

The more I think about it, the more I would characterize my needs as a diary 
and to do list, not just a list of events.

From: Conrad Hughes 
Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2023 11:04 AM
To: doug dougwellington.com 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Calendaring?

So since you sound technically inclined..

Just to follow up with a summary of what's involved in self-hosting,
which *does work* across all platforms if you try hard enough, these are
some of the things you need to consider:

  - You can host the server at home or on a commercial hosting service:
I run davical in a container, and while it didn't do a lot to make
setup easy, it's pretty much fire-and-forget in the manner of most
Linux stuff.  If hosting from home you need to sort out NAT so your
mobile devices can reach the server on the move.  davical is
lightweight and will run on pretty much any hardware you can think
of.  OwnCloud is a viable alternative with similar considerations.

  - You need to work out how you're going to back it up, though it
sounds as if with that clipboard you may not be overly concerned
about backups ;-)

  - The main ongoing annoyance is server certificate updates from Let's
Encrypt or wherever.  Without those, every 3 months/year/whenever
all of the clients will stop trusting the calendar server until you
update your certs.  There are scripts to do this automatically.

  - There's an Android app to seamlessly connect CalDAV into your
'phone's calendar.

  - I am ignorant on this point, but being the origin of the formats
involved, I'm pretty sure that Apple play nicely with it.

  - Windows hates CalDAV but talks to Apple so there is a trick whereby
you point it at a fake account on Apple and then make changes on an
Advanced tab which substitutes your server address; this I have not
made work, but one alternative is to just install a different
Windows calendar app that can talk to CalDAV, which I have made
work.

That all done, you can check your calendar anywhere and update it
wherever you've got Internet access, alarms work fine and (with a server
like davical) you can share it with whoever needs to see it; you can
even create multiple calendars and give people read and/or write access
as needed.

Really to go through all that you've got to have a real dislike of
Google et al.; having seen a few folk lose cloud accounts over the years
I think there are good reasons to avoid 'em but doing so is nowhere near
as easy as it should be and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone: having
your calendar intact as far back as the 1990s is not useful enough.

.. and, wrapping all the way back to your original desire for a command
line app, I've never even tried.  PIM GUIs are annoying but just about
usable on Linux, the 'phone is annoying but also just about usable.

This is waayyy off-topic so I'll stop there.

Conrad

Re: Calendaring?

[doug dougwellington . com]

Actually, I don't share my calendar with anyone.  My wife and I have a paper 
wall calendar where we put future events, but that's about it.

And LOL, yeah, I pretty much only call and text with my phone.  Oh yeah, and 
that Facebook thing and the SiriusXM app.

As for passwords, you won't believe this, but I have a stack of cards with 
passwords next to the computer...  LOL

From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington@nongnu.org 
 on behalf of Ken 
Hornstein 
Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2023 10:54 AM
To: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Calendaring?

>I'm firmly planted in the Linux, MacOS, Windows, and Android worlds.
>So, my current calendar is a piece of paper on a clipboard that I always
>carry with me, LOL!  I find it way more expedient to use the clipboard
>rather than try to have a to-do list app and a calendar app and remember
>which device I'm using at the time and figure out how to keep everything
>in sync.

I mean, hey, whatever works for you ... but do you not have anyone
else who you need to share a calendar with?  To me that is the other
key piece.  If it's just you then you can get away with more analog
solutions.  FWIW, _if_ you are willing to live in the Apple Universe
then the syncing just happens across all of your devices automatically.
I just don't think about it; I know that when I (or anyone else in
my household) add something to any device then soon-ish it will
automatically appear across all devices for everyone in my household.

>I really miss my old Windows phone, but I digress.  Does
>anyone remember the Chandler app?  Warts and all, that was the best
>answer to my habits.

I do remember that, but it seems like it ended up being too complicated
and of course it took Real Money(tm) to push it as far as they got
and they ran out of Real Money.  Also, as I understand it they solved
the syncing issue by running their own CalDev server that other clients
could connect to.

>I've gotten into the practice of using my PC as the master calendar,
>since that's what I use to pay bills, etc., so when I get home, I
>reconcile my clipboard with my PC.  I suppose I should take the time to
>connect my Android with my PC, but I try to keep my phone disconnected
>from everything as much as possible.  I don't install apps, and I try
>not to keep any passwords or charge card info on it...

Geez, what DO you use your Android phone for?  Actually making VOICE
CALLS??? :-)

Since you mentioned it ... what do other people use for password
management?  I ended up using a solution called "Master Password" which
is an open-source password generator which is now called "Spectre"
(https://spectre.app) and has a reasonable paid app for mobile devices.
But I am wondering what other people do.

--Ken

Re: Calendaring?

[doug dougwellington . com]

I'm firmly planted in the Linux, MacOS, Windows, and Android worlds.  So, my 
current calendar is a piece of paper on a clipboard that I always carry with 
me, LOL!  I find it way more expedient to use the clipboard rather than try to 
have a to-do list app and a calendar app and remember which device I'm using at 
the time and figure out how to keep everything in sync.  I really miss my old 
Windows phone, but I digress.  Does anyone remember the Chandler app?  Warts 
and all, that was the best answer to my habits.

I've gotten into the practice of using my PC as the master calendar, since 
that's what I use to pay bills, etc., so when I get home, I reconcile my 
clipboard with my PC.  I suppose I should take the time to connect my Android 
with my PC, but I try to keep my phone disconnected from everything as much as 
possible.  I don't install apps, and I try not to keep any passwords or charge 
card info on it...

From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington@nongnu.org 
 on behalf of Ken 
Hornstein 
Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2023 10:08 AM
To: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Calendaring?

>I'm an old Unix system admin command line type, and I love MH/nmh.
>
>I let the Mac and PC worlds distract me for a bit, but I'm really
>tired of dealing with Calendar, Outlook, and the like, especially when
>Microsoft is threating to change the user interface again.  Is there
>a calendaring program that uses a similar structure to nmh behind the
>scenes?  If one doesn't exist, I might have to make one of my own.

I'm pretty much in the same boat myself.

However ... for _me_ at least the value to a calendar and a reminder
list is having it on all devices so you can add events when you are out;
e.g., adding your next checkup when you are _at_ the dentist and having
it updated everywhere is to me the whole point.  That pretty much means
you're stuck doing some kind of calendar server.  You can run your own
but when I looked at that they had a hellish dependency tree, and of
course running your OWN server in the modern Internet age is a huge pain
unless you pay for a hosting company (and as Conrad notes even that
doesn't guarantee it will work with everything).

I know people that use Google Calendar with some success, and there are
existing command-line tools that interface with that and as far as I
can tell that interfaces with all major client software.  I personally
use the Calendar app on MacOS X, as it is easy to put calendar events
from nmh into it and seems to have reasonable authentication and
sharing capabilities (this only works well if you already use MacOS X
of course).  The Reminders app on MacOS X also deals with events as
standard iCalendar format events (with some MacOS X-specific extension
fields) so you can interface with it; all of the same caveats about
drinking MacOS X Kool-Aid apply.

--Ken

Calendaring?

[doug dougwellington . com]

I'm an old Unix system admin command line type, and I love MH/nmh.

I let the Mac and PC worlds distract me for a bit, but I'm really tired of 
dealing with Calendar, Outlook, and the like, especially when Microsoft is 
threating to change the user interface again.  Is there a calendaring program 
that uses a similar structure to nmh behind the scenes?  If one doesn't exist, 
I might have to make one of my own.

My idea is that there would be a sparse directory structure with levels for 
years, months, and days.  Anything in the past would be stored as a discreet 
event, while events in the future could/would have repeats.  I'd like to be 
able create calendars and to-do lists with all events in the next day, week, 
etc.  Does anyone know of anything like that at all?

Thanks,
Doug

Re: Number of nmh users. (Was: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X)

[doug dougwellington . com]

Thanks!

It's nice to know there are a few still out there.

I've been using MH since 1997 and Unix since 1989, my first taste was BSD on a 
VAX 11/750.  (I'm NOT OLD!!!.  LOL)  People tell me all about the cool 
integrated development environments, but the terminal has always been my 
favorite IDE.

From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington@nongnu.org 
 on behalf of Ralph 
Corderoy 
Sent: Tuesday, April 4, 2023 4:17 AM
To: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Number of nmh users. (Was: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X)

Hi doug,

> There are 26 members on Savannah.  Is that all of us that are left?

The number of subscribers to the mailing lists may be a better
representation.

nmh-announce has ~60.  It goes down whenever there's a
flurry of announcements due to domains having expired, accounts being
deleted, or, quite often, a misconfigured SMTP server.

nmh-workers has ~170.

Debian's statistics suggest 60 use package nmh regularly out of those
taking part in the poll.  https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=nmh

--
Cheers, Ralph.

Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[doug dougwellington . com]

> Us.

Of course.    There are 26 members on Savannah.  Is that all of us that are 
left?

From: George Michaelson 
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 2:01 PM
To: doug dougwellington.com 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

On Tue, 4 Apr 2023, 06:48 doug dougwellington.com, 
mailto:d...@dougwellington.com>> wrote:
> , but who are we maintaining nmh for?

Us.

Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[doug dougwellington . com]

> That screams to me, "this is going to bitrot at some point in the future".

Anybody else remember the NPM debacle?

How One Dev Broke Node and Thousands of Projects In 11 Lines of JavaScript - 
Slashdot
[https://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/programming_64.png]
How One Dev Broke Node and Thousands of Projects In 11 Lines of JavaScript - 
Slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes an article written by Chris Williams for The 
Register: Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed 
installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript. A 
couple of hours ago, Azer Koculu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from 
N...
developers.slashdot.org

> I have no objection to Markdown but I'm not sure what it would gain us 
> exactly,
> other than maybe someone younger than 35 could edit the documentation.

LOL.  OK. I suppose I should comb the archives, but how many of us are actually 
using nmh these days?  I mean, I don't REALLY want to know whether I'm as much 
of a dinosaur as I fear, but who are we maintaining nmh for?

From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington@nongnu.org 
 on behalf of Ken 
Hornstein 
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 1:30 PM
To: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

>>In a more practical sense, I am not sure there is anyone with the free
>>cycles to convert the current man pages into some other markup language.
>
>This seems like the sort of thing that should be possible to automate, and
>that question has been raised before.  A quick search turned up the
>following, among others:
>
>   
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13433903/convert-all-linux-man-pages-to-text-html-or-markdown
>   https://jeromebelleman.gitlab.io/posts/publishing/manpages/

I am ... concerned about depending on pandoc, because of this:

  Pandoc is available in lxplus, aiadm and most RPM repositories. It's
  written in Haskell, which means it relies on hundreds of megabytes of
  library dependencies.

That screams to me, "this is going to bitrot at some point in the
future".  There seems to be a wealth of man/mdoc/roff converters and I
feel like there are always going to be some kind of nroff converter, at
least until Y2038..  I have no objection to Markdown but I'm not sure
what it would gain us exactly, other than maybe someone younger than 35
could edit the documentation.

--Ken

Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[doug dougwellington . com]

>In a more practical sense, I am not sure there is anyone with the free
>cycles to convert the current man pages into some other markup language.

Interesting that you mention that.  I retired last year.  I haven't written a 
line of code in over a year.  Crazy!

Things got out of hand with email for me, I have accounts with Microsoft, 
Apple, Google, and three domain providers.  I'm hoping to figure out some way 
to mirror everything to my local linux box and use nmh and other unix tools 
again.  Once I'm happy with the mirror, I figure I'll delete everything online 
and start pulling everything to my local box and only deal with it there.

Anway, I'm sure I'll have a few cycles that I can devote to documentation...

From: Steven Winikoff 
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 1:18 PM
To: Ken Hornstein 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org ; doug dougwellington.com 

Subject: Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

>In a more practical sense, I am not sure there is anyone with the free
>cycles to convert the current man pages into some other markup language.

This seems like the sort of thing that should be possible to automate, and
that question has been raised before.  A quick search turned up the
following, among others:

   
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13433903/convert-all-linux-man-pages-to-text-html-or-markdown
   https://jeromebelleman.gitlab.io/posts/publishing/manpages/

 - Steven
--
___
Steven Winikoff  | "Science is built upon facts, as a house is
Montreal, QC, Canada |  built of stones; but an accumulation of
s...@smwonline.ca |  facts is no more a science than a heap of
http://smwonline.ca  |  stones is a house."
 |   - Henri Poincaré

Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[doug dougwellington . com]

Ken wrote:
> I am assuming that we still want to ship man pages

To keep with the original intent of the project, I suspect that is the thing to 
do.

> I am kinda against depending on some third-party tool

Where does built-in turn into third-party?  With all the modern package 
managers, it's trivial to install other tools as needed.

> I'm not sure what the options are in this space [snip] some
> other markup format that can output man pages and HTML.

Having been in the python world for so long, I had to deal with markdown, 
restructured text, docutils, sphinx, etc.  Then there's the beast that is 
Doxygen.  They all have benefits and tradeoffs.  How hard do we hold onto the 
old ways vs. embracing new tools?

From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington@nongnu.org 
 on behalf of Robert 
Elz 
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 12:13 PM
To: Ken Hornstein 
Cc: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

Date:Mon, 03 Apr 2023 11:35:35 -0400
From:Ken Hornstein 
Message-ID:  <20230403153539.de26b1ef...@pb-smtp21.pobox.com>

  | What's the difference between mandoc and mdoc?
  | It seems like mandoc is just the program that interprets nroff source?
  | A lesser implementation, as you say.

A restricted implementation, that interprets just the parts of general *roff
that (is believed) man page authors ought be including in man page sources.

mdoc is a *roff macro package which implements a set of macros useful for
making documentation (in particular, manual pages).  A replacement for man(7).

  | I never did really grok troff.

Pity - it can be lots of fun (and like many things highly general and
very powerful, also quite frustrating at times).

  | And that describes me exactly!  The frustrating thing for _me_ is that
  | doing simple stuff (like formatting command options) in man pages seems
  | kinda complicated and mdoc has macros which deal with that exactly.  Like
  | it does all of the stuff I'd ever want to do in man pages.

Yes, that is its point.

  | And it seems like it is everywhere now?

Just about, yes.

  | Is there a reason to NOT use it?

For writing something new, none at all.   But for converting something
someone has already made work, and is full of low level *roff noise to
achieve peculiar effects (that you first have to understand the point of,
then decide if you really need to keep, and then work out how do achieve
with mdoc) then, yes, lots of reasons...

  | My specific question is: should
  | we replace the .fc macros in nmh man pages with mdoc macros?

As I believe you're now aware, you cannot just do that.   It is all or
nothing (as with almost any other *roff macro package) - you cannot take
pieces from one and simply use them with another (though a macro package
can be built as an extension to another macro set - when I was teaching
(a horrible time for the students involved) I had a set of exam paper
macros, which were built on top of ms to produce (several types of) exam
papers - with the ability to include the answers in line, so those are
available for pre-exam review and then for the markers, without being
printed for the students...

If you create something new, use mdoc, it is far easier (particularly once
you get used to its "parsable" and "callable" macro conventions).  What's
more, when you use -mdoc (or mandoc) the macros are smart enough to detect
whether the man page is really -mdoc or is actually -man and use the
appropriate set of macros for that particular page, so no-one needs to
try to work out whether they should be using -mdoc or -man on the command
line, just use -mdoc always.

kre

Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[doug dougwellington . com]

Sorry if I jumped into the middle and missed something, but what about using 
this to convert once?


groff -Thtml


From: nmh-workers-bounces+doug=dougwellington@nongnu.org 
 on behalf of Ken 
Hornstein 
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 11:40 AM
To: nmh-workers@nongnu.org 
Subject: Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

>The status quo is fine.  It doesn't require understanding all of troff.
>Just man(7) plus the odd bit here and there.

Sigh.  The "odd bit" unfortunately, for me, requires a lot of knowledge
that seems to take some serious roff-fu.

Let's take the example you gave where the first line for a man
page that uses tbl should contain:

'\" t

So, my question is ... what does this mean?  I understand that \" is
a comment, but I'm confused about the leading single quote.  As a random
note, this string is rather hard to search for.  Also, I don't really
understand how single quotes are used in roff, I guess; all of the
documentation seems to assume you already know this.  And it's this
way for me for EVERY SINGLE BIT of "odd bit"; there's a huge pile of
knowledge that is assumed you know.  It's not that I'm afraid of digging
into hours-long rat holes; I write programs using OpenSSL, after all.
It's just a lot to deal with when I am just trying to format a nice
table.  And I do it so infrequently that I have to re-learn it all
every time I want to edit a man page.

(I did play around with tbl, and it seems like that is actually very
easy so I am thinking that Anthony is is right and we should just switch
to that).

--Ken