info and man

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Sun, 21 May 2006, Walter Dnes wrote:

> On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 12:37:40AM -0400, Paul King wrote
>
>> The interface for document navigation under info borrows none of the
>> conventions from other programs the way man did. Man used less
>> (sometimes more) as the way to present its troff/nroff-formatted
>> documents, and that was very simple to navigate (using /).
>
>  Here's an idea of mine for a text game...
> http://www.waltdnes.org/annoyances/infosucks.html

.      What is "info" you ask? Some geeks at GNU are obviously annoyed
.      at the fact that the average Joe can now easily get information
.      about GNU apps using "man" with "less" as the pager. They've
.      resorted to the old Bill Gates trick; create a "new and
.      improved" and totally incompatable format and system that
.      renders all your habits and knowledge about man pages useless.
.      No, it's not text-only HTML readable by links/linx/lynx. That
.      would be a standard existing format. We can't have that, can we.
.      Instead, it's a totally new format and a totally new algorithm.

    No, it's not a new format; it predates HTML. Not as good, perhaps,
    but not newer.

>  Any programmers around want to take on that challenge?


-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                      <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
    ===================================================================
    Author:
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
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