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For those who don't, it's a UX nightmare, because the standalone info viewer uses a specific, relatively ill-surfaced subset of Emacs conventions for its naviga

by ansible 10y ago

For those who don't, it's a UX nightmare, because the standalone info viewer uses a specific, relatively ill-surfaced subset of Emacs conventions for its navigation commands. No one who doesn't use Emacs can be expected to know any of these. Even those of us who do use Emacs often don't know any of these. It took me more than half a decade of daily Emacs use to discover them. I hope future generations of user interaction designers pay heed to this. If you're going into the GNU info system to begin with, you're trying to get help, because you don't know something. Chances are, you may not know much about the system at all. So navigating your help system should be very, very easy. Because I'm trying to figure out some other program, and I don't want to spend 15 minutes trying to learn the help system first. A WordStar-like on-screen navigation help for GNU info would have helped me immensely through the years. Yes, it would have wasted valuable screen real estate, so the advanced users would eventually have created a command-line alias to disable it. Guys like me that used GNU info once a year (if that) would have had a much easier time.

glandium 10y ago
Even better: say, you've opened info for something and are lost in it, and try info info, what you get is a list of all the available info pages, preceded by (on my machine): This is the Info main menu (aka directory node). A few useful Info commands: 'q' quits; '?' lists all Info commands; 'h' starts the Info tutorial; 'mTexinfo RET' visits the Texinfo manual, etc. You'd think that's helpful, but... hitting '?' brings a "Regexp search backward" prompt... hitting 'h' brings... (oh irony) the info man page (but it's displayed by info, not man), and the man page has absolutely no information about how this thing works. Only command line arguments.
- throwanem 10y ago
  There appears to exist throughout the "standalone" Info viewer an assumption that you have Emacs globally installed. (I can't imagine why.) If you don't, you're stuck with whatever info documentation your distro packager and software developers provide, which usually is both not much and not good. Anyway, here's throwanem's handy-dandy cheat sheet for Info navigation: m - Select a currently displayed menu item, with partial entry and tab completion p, n - Move to the previous and next sibling nodes at this level of the tree u - Move to the parent of the currently displayed node t - Move to the top level of the currently displayed manual (and u from here takes you back to the directory) s - Search incrementally forward, with wrapping, by substring or (Emacs) regexp C-r - Search incrementally backward, etc., etc. l, r - Move back and forward, respectively, among the list of nodes you've visited this section q - Exit the Info viewer As you see, in a lot of ways Info navigation conceptually corresponds with that in a web browser, especially if itimplements the semantic navigation UI that never really got the love it deserved. (I don't think any current browsers have had that in core for a long time, but there is a Firefox extension that provides them, in the rare case that you actually browse pages which include the metainformation that UI needs in order to work.) But, unlike a browser, Info's UI is so undiscoverable as to be actively hostile to the task-focused user. If you often find yourself struggling with it, perhaps the information here might help.

by ansible 10y ago

glandium 10y ago

Even better: say, you've opened info for something and are lost in it, and try info info, what you get is a list of all the available info pages, preceded by (on my machine): This is the Info main menu (aka directory node). A few useful Info commands: 'q' quits; '?' lists all Info commands; 'h' starts the Info tutorial; 'mTexinfo RET' visits the Texinfo manual, etc. You'd think that's helpful, but... hitting '?' brings a "Regexp search backward" prompt... hitting 'h' brings... (oh irony) the info man page (but it's displayed by info, not man), and the man page has absolutely no information about how this thing works. Only command line arguments.

throwanem 10y ago
There appears to exist throughout the "standalone" Info viewer an assumption that you have Emacs globally installed. (I can't imagine why.) If you don't, you're stuck with whatever info documentation your distro packager and software developers provide, which usually is both not much and not good. Anyway, here's throwanem's handy-dandy cheat sheet for Info navigation: m - Select a currently displayed menu item, with partial entry and tab completion p, n - Move to the previous and next sibling nodes at this level of the tree u - Move to the parent of the currently displayed node t - Move to the top level of the currently displayed manual (and u from here takes you back to the directory) s - Search incrementally forward, with wrapping, by substring or (Emacs) regexp C-r - Search incrementally backward, etc., etc. l, r - Move back and forward, respectively, among the list of nodes you've visited this section q - Exit the Info viewer As you see, in a lot of ways Info navigation conceptually corresponds with that in a web browser, especially if itimplements the semantic navigation UI that never really got the love it deserved. (I don't think any current browsers have had that in core for a long time, but there is a Firefox extension that provides them, in the rare case that you actually browse pages which include the metainformation that UI needs in order to work.) But, unlike a browser, Info's UI is so undiscoverable as to be actively hostile to the task-focused user. If you often find yourself struggling with it, perhaps the information here might help.