Man pages and info pages

[Mark Wooding]

Tim Harig <usernet at ilthio.net> writes:

> When the GNU folk decided to clone *nix they decided that they knew
> better and simply decided to create their own interfaces.

This isn't the case.  Actually Info has a long history prior to GNU: it
was the way that the documentation was presented at the MIT AI lab.  In
fact, Info was used rather like a modern wiki.  The operating system
they used, called ITS, didn't have a concept of file permissions, and
users were encouraged to improve documentation (and programs).  The
original Info viewer was implemented in Emacs (which also originated in
ITS, years before GNU).

Texinfo was a GNU innovation: the idea that you could build both the
Info document and a nice printable manual from a single source was
novel, as was the application to Unix.  But, since Stallman was
documenting large software systems like Emacs and GCC, it doesn't seem
unreasonable to provide manuals which are somewhat more discursive and
leisurely than traditional Unix manpages.  I have a printed copy of the
GNU Emacs 18 manual (from 1987): it's almost 300 pages long.  The modern
manual for Emacs 23 is several /times/ larger than this.  Man pages
don't scale that well.

I do agree it's annoying that the official coreutils documentation is in
Texinfo.

> Actually, the left arrow key does not work at all intuitively.  One
> would expect that it should go back to the previous page as it would
> in lynx, etc.  It does not.

It moves the cursor so you can hit links.  The l key takes you back
through your recent viewing history -- and has done for thirty years.

> By tradition 'n' and 'p' are broken for scrolling in a page.  'b' is
> often used in place of p but that seems to take one back to the top of
> the page.

Space and backspace are an older tradition.

> The s key for a search is another example that has already been
> discussed.

I find C-s more useful in Info, because it searches interactively.  I
frequently get muddled when I try to search in `modern' programs like
web browsers, because they've gratuitously made C-s try to save the page
(something one hardly ever wants to do) rather than search.  (Finding is
different: finding is what happens at the end of a /successful/ search.
So C-f is poorly chosen.)

-- [mdw]