Subject: Re: bug#3717: M-x man completion

From: Juri Linkov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:56:38 +0200

>>> But then you don't see additional information about section names that
>>> may help to select the necessary manual.
>>
>> You mean on a unique name, like say "gunzip"?  I wasn't terribly
>> interested in the section number as a suffix if it's unique.
>
> You are not interested in the section number for "gunzip" because you
> already know that it's a command name.  I'm not interested in the
> section number for known commands too.
>
> But in the rest 90% cases, I would be terribly interested in the section
> number to know if the unique name belongs to 3erl or 3form or 3menu or 3nas
> or 3ncurses or 3perl or 3pm or 3readline or 3ssl or 3tiff or 3x.

I think with the Stefan's 2009-11-27 change we have almost perfect
implementation.  After typing `M-x man RET gunzip TAB' it stops at
"gunzip", not at "gunzip(1)" (that you can get with another TAB).
That's nice.

The only problem I see is with the "2 chmod" format completion.
Currently it's too difficult to use it.  Let's see:

  M-x man RET 2 TAB [No match]

Another attempt:

  M-x man RET 2 SPC [No match]

Only after quoting SPC you get a list of completions for the section 2:

  M-x man RET 2 C-q SPC TAB

I think it would be fine to list manuals of the section 2 after:

  M-x man RET 2 TAB

because manual names that begin with a digit are very rare.
Here I can find only one such command - "7z".  We could add this
sole name to the list of manuals from the section 7 on typing

  M-x man RET 7 TAB

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/