One of those monumental days ........

[Ian Zimmerman]

Walter> I'm talking specifically about "info".  Remember the old text
Walter> adventure games like Zork?  You'd press an arrow in a random
Walter> direction, trying to get to your destination.  Instead, you'd
Walter> end up in some random chamber on another level.  You could
Walter> easily waste hours playing the game.  "info" works exactly the
Walter> same way... *BUT I DON'T WANNA WASTE MY TIME PLAYING GAMES AND
Walter> NAVIGATING UP AND DOWN BETWEEN RANDOM LEVELS WHEN I'M MERELY
Walter> TRYING TO FIND THE PROPER SYNTAX FOR A LINUX COMMAND*!!!

Andrej> pinfo will ease your pain. It's an info viewer with a lynx-like
Andrej> command set and navigation paradigm. I always get lost with the
Andrej> stock info viewer, but pinfo makes info files... tolerable. So
Andrej> does konqueror

This is a red herring.  Walter's problem with info seems to be that he
can't do linear text searches (but see below).  pinfo doesn't help with
that at all; the whole difference between pinfo and the reference info
viewer is in the keybindings.

I actually prefer the info bindings, if you want to choose the 9th menu
item a single keystroke gets you there rather than 9 tabs or downs.

But the best way to read info files is from Emacs: you get the info
bindings by default, but as it is Emacs you can also change them to
anything you like.  And in Emacs, you can actually do a search across
the whole info file just like in a pager.  Well, actually I have to
qualify that, if the info document is split into chunks as some of the
big ones are it only works across each chunk.

For those who insist on reading documentation with a Web browser, there
is also info2www which converts info documents into HTML on the fly.

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