> From: Dave Kemper <[email protected]> > Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2023 00:01:33 -0600 > Cc: Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]>, > "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]>, [email protected] > > On 1/7/23, Arsen Arsenović <[email protected]> wrote: > > Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> writes: > >> How about adding the following: > >> > >> For readers more familiar with manual pages, it might be interesting > >> to pipe info(1) through less(1): > >> > >> info info | less > > > > This suffers from decreased navigability, though, as links (xrefs and > > menu entries especially) become non-clickable. > > That's a judgment call. I find it more navigable despite that > restriction, in part because the entire manual is available on one > (virtual) page. Admittedly I'm also more familiar with "less" than > with the "info" interface, but "less" can be used to browse any file > or pipeline output, whereas "info" can be used to browse only info > manuals, so the "less" interface is by far the more useful one to > master. This is in line with the Unix philosophy: use combinations of > simple tools to do complex things.
An Info manual is much more than the sum total of the text in it. The cross-references and the index commands make finding stuff in an Info much more efficient and fast, and the ability to jump to a cross-referenced material and then come back allows to consult the details without losing the context and the main subject you are reading on. It is not a coincidence that the GNU project deprecated man pages in favor of Info manuals. Frankly, I cannot even understand how you can compare a linear reading through sufficiently long text, with only Less-style regexp search as your navigation aid, with what an Info reader provides when you read an Info manual. > The important thing, I think, is that nowhere does the man page > mention info's behavior when its output is piped or redirected. > "info" being interactive, it probably doesn't even occur to most users > *to* pipe or redirect it (it certainly didn't to me until someone else > pointed out that trick), and none of the examples in the EXAMPLES > section take advantage of this. A single sentence about this in the > DESCRIPTION, plus a single example illustrating it in EXAMPLES, would > let users deduce the "| less" behavior even if that was not the > specific example used (though it does seem the most obvious). It's an obscure capability that is useful in marginal situations. A large manual piped like this will present a humongously long linear text, and I doubt that the result will be a convenient read. It's again not an incident that the vast majority of man pages are quite short and dedicated to a single relatively small subject.
