On Tue, Jun 11, 2024 at 11:22:17PM +0700, Max Nikulin wrote: > 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.
See, this is all fine -- you've searched for the appropriate section, and you've generated a cryptic command that someone else could type inside emacs to get to that same section. I'm sure there's an "info" equivalent that can be done from a shell without invoking emacs. None of that's useful to a person who wants to search for that information in the first place without consulting an expert who's already done the work. What I was trying to do in my reply was "teach them how to fish" -- to show them how to bring up the man page themselves, and look for basic information like "how do I get the name of the day of the week, instead of the numeric index of the day of the week" without having to bother an international mailing list. So, I gave basic instructions for how to bring up the man page, and a hint about searching for a key word related to their question. I even provided a small piece of the man page, which happens to include the answer they're looking for, because I'm also a pessimist who knows that they probably won't look it up themselves, and may become angry if we don't spoon-feed them the actual answer. I also provided a reference to the info page, and a command that would bring that up, should the need ever arise. More importantly, I revealed that info pages *exist* and *are a thing* that they need to know about. It's planting a seed for the future.
