more

[Geoff Collyer]

In article <8350 at brl-tgr.ARPA>, cottrell at nbs-vms.ARPA (jim cottrell?)
defended more against Doug Gwyn's denunciation of more.

I haven't seen Doug's original article (it will probably show up
tonight), but this has been hashed over before.  I suggest that you go
re-read the unix-wizards archives at the nearest site that archives it
(backbone sites are a good bet).  You will find there a *simple* and
slightly out-of-date kernel terminal driver paginator by Ron Gomes,
posted by me, (which behaves intelligently and only works in cooked
mode and can be turned off or set to differing page sizes, etc.) for V7
and 4.2BSD.  I don't have a System V system, so I don't have a version
for it yet.

If you don't like terminal driver paging for religious reasons, or you
are unfortunate enough not to be able to put it into your terminal or
terminal driver, I can mail you a one-page filter that paginates (*and
nothing else*) or you can use p (originally written by Henry Spencer),
from The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike,
which paginates and, all right, the later refinements *do* have a shell
escape and interactive file name spelling correction (*and nothing
else*).

More is unmaintainable and absymally designed.  It is *not* a tool:  it
does not do one thing and do it well - it does umpteen things, some of
them badly, including its shell escape.  I do wish Berkeley and others
would get the message and *drop* more from their distributions.

`The right solution in the right place is always more effective than
haphazard hacking.' -- Kernighan & Pike, BLTJ UNIX System issue,
p. 1605.  More is the wrong solution in the wrong place.  The right
place is the terminal or its driver (see above).

`Merely adding features does not make it easier for users to do things
-- it just makes the manual thicker.' -- ibid.  Glancing at the 4.2BSD
more(1) manual page (sic) (all three of them), I see that more expends
an awful lot of effort honking and hooting at people; I really don't
need that silly --More-- prompt in inverse video.  If you want to leap
around a file, why not use your favourite video (oops, full-screen,
sorry, haven't got the newspeak down yet) editor, rather than putting
part of a badly designed video editor into more?

I apologise to those who have seen this discussion before and refer
those who have not seen it before to the archives.  Sorry for any
flamage: this is very restrained compared to what I feel.