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Re: manual




On 2022-12-21 22:31, Lawrence Velázquez wrote:

It already says where to look.

	For the meaning of the other flags, see zshoptions(1).

I know it.  They send you to another section entirely which is 1487 lines long.  Not very friendly.  Please understand that it's my 'job' in a discussion like this to be crabby and snotty and hard to please.   Devil's advocate is what I'm being.


	Some options also have one or more single letter names.
	There are two sets of single letter options: one used by
	default, and another used to emulate sh/ksh (used when the
	SH_OPTION_LETTERS option is set).  The single letter options
	can be used on the shell command line, or with the `set',
	`setopt' and `unsetopt' builtins, as normal Unix options preceded
	by `-'.

	The sense of the single letter options may be inverted by
	using `+' instead of `-'.  Some of the single letter option
	names refer to an option being off, in which case the
	inversion of that name refers to the option being on.  For
	example, `+n' is the short name of `exec', and `-n' is the
	short name of its inversion, `noexec'.

That's quite well written.  Throw in some examples and it's good. But one should not have to go hunting for that information.  Unless ... there is some heavy reason why that's needed, in which case there should be a note to that effect: "( The subject of options is so extensive that it requires it's own elaboration and can't be fully explained here.  Please see 'zshoptions' in the manual for a full development of the topic.)" ... or something like that.

The synopsis makes it quite clear that -A and +A can be used alone.

	set ... [ {+|-}A [ name ] ] ...

Clear to you but not to me.  I missed it.  The expert will always find the manual good enough but that's not the test.  The test is whether the student found it good enough.  (Mind, there will be times when the student, fallible human that he is, might miss something that really is well explained.  And to be honest, I think that's the case here -- it is good enough, but overwhelmed as I was by everything else, I missed the easy part.)  Again, I hardly expected to get it right the first time, that would be a miracle.  It was a template.

The only thing that matters is that I've got a few of you guys thinking about all this :-)







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