Re: Info vs Man

["Paul Smith" <pausmith@nortelnetworks.com>]

%% "Monique Y. Herman" <spam@bounceswoosh.org> writes:

  myh> I'll take a single document that I can search and eyeball-scan
  myh> over multiple linked documents almost always.  Example: the
  myh> fetchmail man page.  Yes, it's farking huge, but I can find what
  myh> I need by searching on a key term.

Well, Info obviously has searching ("s") of course.  There's nothing
unique in that.

But what if your "key term" is a common word?  What if, for example, you
want to know about the "set" command in bash?  The bash man page is huge
and searching all the instances of the word "set" in there to find the
one you want cannot be termed "quick and easy" by any stretch.

Info files also have an index, and you can jump to any indexed term
merely by typing "i" then entering the term.  In an Info-ized bash
manual you'd just type "i set RET" and it would send you right to the
definition of the "set" command.  Easy-peasy.

  myh> When I'm looking at the mutt (or any) documentation online, I'd
  myh> rather have the "one big file" approach than the linked approach,
  myh> too.

If you want the whole thing you can just redirect the output of "info";
if stdout is not a TTY it just dumps the entire manual to stdout:

  info make | less

Or, if you prefer to read sequentially, you can simply continuously hit
SPC and Info will walk you entirely through the document in order
without any hassle about internal structure.

  myh> Maybe it's just me, but I've never felt comfortable with info.
  myh> If the man pages give me some line about how info is the official
  myh> documentation format, I just head to google.  Info is too much of
  myh> a pain.

I see this a lot from people who've never bothered to learn Info's
features.  Really, Info has about 10 commands: it can't take more than 2
minutes to learn them.  I like man; I've written many man pages in my
time.  But Info is clearly superior for reading any documentation of
significant size and complexity.


But, I don't mean to complain: at least you're not suggesting everyone
should use HTML instead!  Ugh!  :).

-- 
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 Paul D. Smith <psmith@nortelnetworks.com>   HASMAT--HA Software Mthds & Tools
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
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