Hi,
I saw there https://askubuntu.com/questions/9325/what-is-the-difference-between-man-and-info-documentation that info is “better” than man because is outdated. Still right in 2023 ?
Well… I guess I have been living under a rock. Today is the first time to have heard of info. I have been using man for well over 2 decades now.
Surprising you haven’t come across a man page that basically says “We couldn’t be bothered putting everything in here, check out the info page on it instead.”
I feel like I find myself on one of those every 6 months or so.
That’s funny, I had the opposite experience. When I found out that info was the GNU projects recommended way of documentation, I was all on board. Then I tried using it, and it couldn’t find most CLI software I used. So I downloaded the texinfo archives… and that still lacked probably 50% of the commands I tried to look up.
Then I searched up how to get info pages for this or that tool, and someone on StackOverflow had said that it was woefully incomplete and outdated at this point.
I think I’ll give it another try and report back
9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (https://tldr.sh/). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.
Please remove the exclamation mark before your link, you are making it an image that obviously can’t be loaded.
The “info” thing was a misguided attempt by a crazed bunch of emacs zealots to usurp the rightful position of “man”. Probably GNU’s worst idea. It persisted in having some popularity for a decade or more but is now mostly forgotten I think. Despite having used Debian for the past ten years straight I’ve only just now found out that info doesn’t even get installed by default any more.
Eh, to be honest, manpages aren’t particularly good as either documentation or quick references (hence the popularity of tldr), and info is intended primarily for the sort of long-form, comprehensive documentation that would be awkward to fit in a manpage. Also, texinfo documents can easily be exported to HTML, so one format can be used for both online and offline docs. It’s an admirable effort, if nothing else.
I’d have liked it a lot better if it had been intended and used as a place to put the more extensive documentation that isn’t really appropriate for a man page, while leaving the man pages as they were. Instead, I learned about it back in the day by being frequently annoyed at missing man pages for basic tools, which had been replaced with suggestions to look at ‘info’ instead, which always seemed to be much less concise and have a worse UI.
Just because it’s theirs? I figured it would be because of an alleged gender issue, for the same reason some are trying to do away with whitelists/blacklists and the like.
One offers info, the other mansplains /S
Info is supposedly more modern, like a website. But it’s unusable and as annoying as emacs. Man is good enough.
