5 ms·

>solving the real problems of man pages (which I'd say there are two: lack of hyperlinks and poor searchability texinfo (info) has hyperlinks, and I can search

by catern 10y ago

>solving the real problems of man pages (which I'd say there are two: lack of hyperlinks and poor searchability texinfo (info) has hyperlinks, and I can search through multiple manuals if that's what you mean by searchability. And it's probably already installed on your system.

pwdisswordfish 10y ago
I can never remember which manual page contains a description of struct timespec, for example. Running apropos or man -k didn't help me. I only found out it's time.h(0p) by a lucky guess. Info is actually a quite decent idea, it's just executed poorly. Info pages are written like books, while I really miss the concise lexicon-like format of man pages. And it doesn't help that the default GNU info viewer is on one hand unusable for someone who isn't already an Emacs user, and on the other redundant for Emacs users. (I am the former. Fortunately, there's pinfo.)
- catern 10y ago
  Ah. Just open the libc manual with "info libc", then "i" to look something up in the index, and type "struct timespec". (You can even tab-complete the name of the struct). >And it doesn't help that the default GNU info viewer is on one hand unusable for someone who isn't already an Emacs user Yes, well, did you consider running "info info"? :) There's a tutorial accessible with "h". It's not as if there's much to learn, the arrow keys and Enter work fine for navigating and following links.
  - glandium 10y ago
    `info info` is useless when you don't know info and don't have emacs installed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12301491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12301491
    - catern 10y ago
      That's incorrect. That's what happens when the info documentation for info has not been installed by your distribution. Normally you get https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/info-stnd/info-stnd.html https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/info-stnd/info-s...

by catern 10y ago

pwdisswordfish 10y ago

I can never remember which manual page contains a description of struct timespec, for example. Running apropos or man -k didn't help me. I only found out it's time.h(0p) by a lucky guess. Info is actually a quite decent idea, it's just executed poorly. Info pages are written like books, while I really miss the concise lexicon-like format of man pages. And it doesn't help that the default GNU info viewer is on one hand unusable for someone who isn't already an Emacs user, and on the other redundant for Emacs users. (I am the former. Fortunately, there's pinfo.)

catern 10y ago
Ah. Just open the libc manual with "info libc", then "i" to look something up in the index, and type "struct timespec". (You can even tab-complete the name of the struct). >And it doesn't help that the default GNU info viewer is on one hand unusable for someone who isn't already an Emacs user Yes, well, did you consider running "info info"? :) There's a tutorial accessible with "h". It's not as if there's much to learn, the arrow keys and Enter work fine for navigating and following links.
- glandium 10y ago
  `info info` is useless when you don't know info and don't have emacs installed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12301491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12301491
  - catern 10y ago
    That's incorrect. That's what happens when the info documentation for info has not been installed by your distribution. Normally you get https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/info-stnd/info-stnd.html https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/info-stnd/info-s...