Re: [OT] How could info be improved? (Was: Modernizing Documentation format?)

[Clinton Bunch <cdb_zsh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/30/2025 13:47, Stephane Chazelas wrote:
> 2025-08-30 11:27:49 -0500, Clinton Bunch:
> [...]
> > > I never could understand what issues people had with "info". I
> > > can only explain it by them not having spent the time
> > > understanding how to use it.
> > Bit of a chicken and egg problem with a non-intuitive interface, how do you
> > read the documentation to figure out how to use a documentation reader?
> [...]
>
> "info info" seems more helpful to me tnan "man man" for a
> beginner, especially considering that actually to learn how to
> use man, you also need something like:

You use man man if you want to customize the behavior of man. Otherwise 
someone tells you to run man ls to find out about ls, and you hit space 
to go to the next screen

my experience of info was that you had to know how to use info to get to 
the documentation you needed to read.  man and more just worked.  Man is 
not a good documentation format for large complex topics, it sucks as a 
tutorial format.  It is reference material. Info may be a superior 
format, but when I'm trying to learn how to use ls, I don't want to 
first read how to use info.

Now that I use PuTTY (instead of a terminal) to log into my Unix/Linux 
boxes, I'm just as likely to use Google in my handy browser.

> man "$(basename -- "${MANPAGER:-${PAGER:-pager}}")"
Huh?  I've never used a command like that in over 30 years.
> which to be fair you can somewhat infer from man man.
>
> You'll notice that if you just start info by itself or on
> anything, you'll get a helpful:
>
> > Welcome to Info version 7.1.  Type H for help, h for tutorial.
> At the bottom. "h" bringing you the same as info info.
>
> (to be fair "less" (a common pager for man) and most also tell
> you how to reach their help; w3m and most implementations of
> more don't; that's the manual of man though)
>
> First lines at "info info" are
>
> > This documentation describes the stand-alone Info reader which
> > you can use to read Info documentation.
> >
> > If you are new to the Info reader, then you can get started by
> > typing ‘H’ for a list of basic key bindings.  You can read
> > through the rest of this manual by typing <SPC> and <DEL> (or
> > <Space> and <Backspace>) to move forwards and backwards in it.
> I struggle to think of any way how we could improve it.