On 11/06/2024 06:45, Greg Wooledge wrote:
Should you ever feel a need to read the longer version of the documentation, it's in GNU info pages. So you would need to type the command "info coreutils date" to get to it. And then you'd need to figure out the user interface of the "info" program, which is not intuitive unless you happen to be an emacs power user already.
Emacs power users can type
M-x info RET
or
M-: (info "(coreutils) date conversion specifiers") RET
or at least
emacs -f info-standalone '(coreutils) date conversion specifiers'
I do not mind that info browsers have usability issues. For beginners I
would recommend tkinfo instead of terminal "info". I have not tried pinfo.
Texinfo, unlike man, has a notion of hyperlink. In the case of man it is just formatting that suggests that some part of text is a reference to another document or another section. It was created for "online" version of printed manuals. Info is more convenient for navigation in long document and makes it easier to specify a particular section. In the case of man it requires some tricks like
man -P 'less -p %a' date