[Tcsh] tcsh.man improvements style question

[Kimmo Suominen]

Hi Luke,

A history reference may have a word designator but no event
specification. Thus the history word designators table entries can be
preceded by either a colon or an exclamation point. (With the possible
exception of !% not making sense... I'm not sure.) So users searching
for e.g. :$ would be happy, but those searching for !$ would not be.

The last two paragraphs of the "History word designators" section are
somewhat difficult to follow to begin with. Turning them into a table
might help, at the cost of replicating the existing table in that
section.

Or how about adding a column to the existing table to show e.g. both
:$ and !$ with an explanation for the columns?

In any case, I think it is a good improvement. Just trying to think
about how to fix one more use case. :)

Cheers,
+ Kimmo

On Sat, 3 Dec 2022 at 11:34, Luke Mewburn <luke at mewburn.net> wrote:
>
> Hi tcsh list,
>
> I've made various improvements to tcsh.man over the last couple of
> weeks, including finishing the mandoc / mdoc conversion, and improving
> the overall markup when rendered as ASCII, UTF-8 or postscript/PDF.
>
> Recently I made some more improvements including adding more subsection
> headers to (hopefully) make it easier to find documentation:
>         History event specification
>         History word designators
>         History word modifiers
>         History abbreviation
>         History editor commands
>         Variable substitution metasequences
>         Variable substitution without modifiers
>
> These are in commit 06dab61 in pull request https://github.com/tcsh-org/tcsh/pull/62
>
>
> As a followup to that, I was considering some more changes which I think
> may make searching for certain items easier (IMHO), but may be
> controversial so I wanted to solicit input from Christos, Kimmo, and the
> tcsh community.
>
> Currently, there are various lists of items, and I would like to explicitly
> prefix the item with the selector, so it's easier to search.
>
> E.g, prefix all the history word modifiers with ':' so you can search for ':h'
> instead of the more generic 'h'.
>
>
> History event specification
>
>    existing:
>            n      A number, referring to a particular event.
>            -n     An offset, referring to the event n before the current
>                   event.
>            #      The current event.  This should be used carefully in csh(1),
>                   where there is no check for recursion.  tcsh allows 10 lev‐
>                   els of recursion. (+)
>
>
>    proposal - prefix with !:
>            !n     A number, referring to a particular event.
>            !-n    An offset, referring to the event n before the current
>                   event.
>            !#     The current event.  This should be used carefully in csh(1),
>                   where there is no check for recursion.  tcsh allows 10 lev‐
>                   els of recursion. (+)
>
>
> History word designators
>
>    existing:
>            0     The first (command) word.
>            n     The nth argument.
>            ^     The first argument, equivalent to ‘1’.
>
>    proposal - prefix with :
>            :0    The first (command) word.
>            :n    The nth argument.
>            :^    The first argument, equivalent to ‘1’.
>
>
> History word modifiers
>
>    existing:
>            h       Remove a trailing pathname component, leaving the head.
>            t       Remove all leading pathname components, leaving the tail.
>            r       Remove a filename extension ‘.xxx’, leaving the root name.
>
>    proposal - prefix with : (and probably sort)
>            :h      Remove a trailing pathname component, leaving the head.
>            :t      Remove all leading pathname components, leaving the tail.
>            :r      Remove a filename extension ‘.xxx’, leaving the root name.
>
>
> File inquiry operators
>
>    existing:
>            r    Read access.
>            w    Write access.
>            x    Execute access.
>
>    proposal - prefix with - and probably sort:
>            -r   Read access.
>            -w   Write access.
>            -x   Execute access.
>
>
>
> thoughts?
>
>
> Luke.
> --
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