>
> Here is my humble opinion.
>
> It is impossible to compress the man page from, say, 5000 lines to 10.
>
> Such summary may be useful to get some initial information about FVWM, but
> it will not answer any non trivial question, so in the end the user should
> read 10+5000 lines. :)
>
You're completely right. Nothing magic can be done. I do not claim
that programs can be powerful and user-friendly without any documentation.
The extensive documentation of fvwm is a very good point :)
Let me however explain my point of view a bit more.
When I decided to choose a window manager 2 years ago,
I wanted an overview. When I tried to read the documentation,
I had to read at the very beginning technical things like M4
preprocessing, ICCM compliance ... whereas I was just
an end user without any knowledge on the difference
between X, a window manager or a Desktop.
Even for simple things like the size of the window,
I found rather difficult to
read technical details _before_ having a general
picture of fvwm: there are
-commands for graphical appearance,
-menus, functions and modules to add functionalities,
-and key bindings for ergonomics.
Whereas I was in difficulty because of my
poor knowledge to read the documentation,
my needs were very basic.
To be concrete, I had 2 basic needs:
I wanted to know if
if fvwm had the qualities I was looking for:
light, configurable, open source.
I didn't wan't any ``automatic feature''
since I wanted to keep exactly my environment
from one version of the wm to the following.
To sum up, my first need was a ``philosophical
presentation of fvwm'' to understand if it
was the good choice.
My second need was a quick technical introduction
so that I could set up a poor configuration easily,
which could be enriched by reading the documentation
later on.
I think the current documentation is more or less written
for developpers or at least very advanced end-users.
I think however that fvwm has so many qualities that
it can be of use to average end-users.
The goal of an introductive documentation
would be to help these guys. It wouldn't compete with
the current documentation.
Laurent.
--
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Received on Wed Mar 06 2002 - 13:32:34 GMT