[640] in Athena Bugs
emacs manual page
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Harrington)
Thu Aug 25 16:30:30 1988
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 16:28:36 EDT
From: Joe Harrington <jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
what a monstrosity!! Athena should not be proud of this animal.
manual pages are for REFERENCE and INTRODUCTION, not tutorial, not
release notes. The information about how to use Xresources belongs
elsewhere. The MOST that should be here is a pointer to the release
notes, or to other instructions about xresources, etc. The details
about x-set-x10-mouse-bindings is far too verbose. This thing reads
like an "essential" doc. Why describe in detail how to use the X10
features when you don't even explain the basic movement and editing
commands, nor the correct way to use emacs on an X display (i.e. in
the background)? Why is the reference to the help tutorial deep in
the middle of a long paragraph on the fourth screen page? No wonder
users flame about poor emacs documentation. There is a ton of
description of all the peripheral things, and no basic description of
the function of the program.
gawd!
--jh--
