Re: does (setq Man-switches "-a") work?

[Emanuel Berg]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> What switches are supported?
>
> Any switches supported by the 'man' command
> you have installed, I think.

zshall(1) with Emacs M-x man RET zshall RET

"page 1 of 16", and page 1 has 345 lines,

same with
(setq Man-switches "-a")
and
(setq Man-switches "")

In the Unix shell with man(1) - no concept of
a sixteenth division, 'man -a' loads the whole
manpage immediately and if you hit G you get to
line 32 213.

> It does work: it produces all of the man
> pages by that name, in all of the sections.
> You just need to go from one to the other
> with M-n and M-p, as "C-h m" tells you.

If you are to search the entire document for
a keyword, the entire document must be in one
and only one buffer.

>> The Unix man(1) is a pager.
>
> No, 'man' is not a pager. It is a program
> that formats and displays manual pages.
> A pager is a program like 'more' or 'less'.
> At least that's what I would call a "pager".

$ man man

MAN(1)                    Manual pager utils                   MAN(1)

[...]

       -P pager, --pager=pager
              Specify which output pager to  use.   By  default,  man
              uses  pager.  This option overrides the $MANPAGER envi‐
              ronment variable, which in turn  overrides  the  $PAGER
              environment  variable.

What's pager?

$ t pager # [1]
/usr/bin/pager
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 23 Mar 18  2016 /usr/bin/pager -> /etc/alternatives/pager
 * links to: /bin/less 
             -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 148K Mar  5  2016 /bin/less


[1] https://dataswamp.org/~incal/conf/.zsh/ide (line 67)

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