info vs man
There is an interesting discussion underway on the TLUG mailing
list about basically how difficult info pages are to navigate and
how easier it is using 'less' and 'man' Some comments so far...
> Thank God. My pet peeve about 'info' is that it breaks up into pieces
> and forces me to navigate using keystrokes. Whereas 'manpage' gives me
> single document which can be piped to 'less'.
>> Which you navigate using keystrokes.
> And many of the keystrokes in "less" are used in vi. Your UNIX knowledge is
> transferrable to several apps, lessening your learning curve and allowing you to
> concentrate on actually _using_ the operating system. Even in bash, you can tweak
> your .bashrc to allow you to use vi keystrokes to edit your command line. With
> the invention of "info", that knowledge was no longer transferrable to the new
> interface. In a company environment, these things mean time to have to re-learn
> new tricks, and that is money not used to do whatever else you were hired to do.
> I would like to see Linux move toward simplicity and elegance. Info is a move
> away from that trend, in my view.
I would argue... And many of the keystrokes in "info" are used in
emacs. Your UNIX knowledge is transferable to several apps,
lessening your learning curve and allowing you to concentrate on
actually _using_ the operating system. Even in bash, you can tweak
your .bashrc to allow you to use emacs keystrokes to edit your
command line. With the invention of "man", that knowledge was no
longer transferable to the new interface. In a company environment,
these things mean time to have to re-learn new tricks, and that is
money not used to do whatever else you were hired to do. I would
like to see Linux move toward simplicity and elegance. Man/less is
a move away from that trend, in my view.
I don't see the big deal though, on my Debian computer typing 'info
gcc' opens up the info page. I type / and it asks for a search
term, just like in man/less (except its also a regular expression
search) This search applies to all nodes in the document not just
the current page. Tapping the space bar (just like in man/less)
takes me page by page through the document. Pressing q (just like
in man/less) quits the process.
Given that, I really don't see what extra keystrokes you are being
forced to learn.
I agree that to a brand new linux user, user *both* man pages and
info pages are not exactly a pleasant way to get your dose of
documentation and many times when reading documentation we tend to
already be in an unsavoury mood because we are stuck and *have* to
go look something up so there is already a
"lets get this over
with" attitude going in... but that's a mental thing, more to
do with how we approach documentation.
Disclaimer: I am heavily biased toward emacs
and info pages