Comment by IgorPartola

8 years ago

Anyone ever get anything useful out of info pages (vs man pages)? I never quite got what their deal was.

8 comments

IgorPartola

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patrec  8 years ago

A manpage is a glorified README. An info page is a non-horrendous version of a html manual. So to see the appeal, don't compare `man cp` with `info cp`, try some more substantial manual like the emacs manual or python's documentation. Also, emacs is a much better info reader than the standalone program.

Info pages are at least an order of magnitude more efficient to navigate than the html documentation that has supplanted them. All the following are fast and a single keypress:

- regexp (s)earch (not just the current page, the whole document)

- hierarchical navigation ((u)p, (n)ext, (p)revious)

- jump to any (i)ndex topic

- jump between links/sections (by position: tab, shift-tab, by na(m)e)

The main shortcoming of info is no support for styling (or graphics) whatsoever, but if you're used to its efficiency using a mix of googling and clicking to navigate the html equivalent is profoundly frustrating.

The closest modern equivalent I know of is Dash.

mjw1007  8 years ago

As far as the content and organisation goes, they're basically doing everything right that manpages do wrong.

They separate tutorial and reference documentation, don't collapse under their own weight when they get large, and have a way to find the documentation for a particular short option.

The original standalone terminal reader was pretty poor, though. These days use pinfo or the html version if you're not an emacs user.

For a good example, compare `man sed` with `pinfo sed`.

  • jwilk  8 years ago

    > have a way to find the documentation for a particular short option

    How?

    • mjw1007  8 years ago

      There's an index, usually a separate one for command-line options.

      For example in the sed info pages it's under "Command and Option Index" at the bottom of the top-level menu.

      And, at least in the emacs viewer, there's a keyboard shortcut so you can just type something like « i - n » to see the docs for -n.

      1 reply →

NelsonMinar  8 years ago

info is a failed GNU experiment to replace man pages. I stated that strongly, but they've never caught on. It's too bad; GNU had a whole plan of improving Unix learnability with getopt, bash completion, info, etc. It's all sort of been useful but hasn't really changed the way people work.

orangeshark  8 years ago

I like using info pages, pretty helpful when you use it with Emacs. Sort of wish more projects would use it.