[rescue] info trumps man

[Phil Stracchino]

Richard wrote:
> In article <20060118220409.GI23708 at widomaker.com>,
>     Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>  writes:
>>The content sometimes sucks because GNU people often write bad
>>documentation and often only in info format, but that's not the fault of
>>Linux.
> 
> If there's any one thing overall that irritates the shit out of me with
> the GNU folks, its this NIH philosophy that's pervasive across all of
> GNU to the point that their man pages are useless and always refer me
> to some info documentation that is a total piece of shit reference and
> usually a half-assed tutorial.
> 
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with man pages and they are *much*
> more useful than info pages.... unless you use emacs as your shell and
> sit inside it all day long.  Which I don't.  I hate it when gnu tools
> take a perfectly good man page that was originally shipping with the
> tool and instead replace it with a stub that says "look at our info
> page, you dumb shit" and the info docs are *worse* than what was in
> the original man page.  One step forward, two steps back.


What he ...   er, THEY said.  (DAMN YOU, RICHARD STALLMAN!)  The man
system Just Works.  You basically need to know one command to use it,
and it's an obvious and intuitive step to use it on itself in order to
learn more simply by typing "man man".

Unless you live, eat and breathe emacs, info is a nightmare.  Every time
I try to look up anything using info, I end up getting lost in a maze of
cryptic sub-modes and ctrl-meta-shift-X alt-meta-F2 commands, unable to
get out, and resorting to a 'pkill info' from another xterm.  A
documentation system that may be used by people completely new to Unix
and all Unix software should not require a friggin' embedded tutorial
mode just to teach them how to use it.

I've always said thet emacs isn't an editor, it's a text-mode
operating/windowing environment with delusions of being a text editor.
It is the end-case of creeping featuritis.  info is the documentation
system naturally resulting from the mindset that produced emacs.


-- 
 Phil Stracchino       phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net
    Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker
 Mobile: 603-216-7037         Landline: 603-886-3518