info and man

[John Macdonald]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 11:00:49PM +0100, david thornton wrote:
> I dunno what all the fuss is abut.
> 
> Took me a couple of days to learn what I needed to walk around info.
> 
> nearly the same amount of time to learn how to get around vi.
> 
> I mean gawd, it's a document viewer, how hard does it have to be?

Yeah, I take a few hours to learn info keystrokes every six
months or so - i.e. every time I have no other choice for
getting a piece of documentation.  In the mean time, I use less
many time a day to control viewing the output from any of the
thousands of programs that can generate more than a page of
output at a time.  Since they all just generate a stream of
text, I get to use the same viewing program for all of them,
and I only had to learn the interface once.  (Well, a few
times - pg, page, more and less each had their turn as the
best choice available; but none of them were tied to any
input requirement other than a text stream.)

If every one of those thousands of programs had instead been
written with their own private viewing format, none of them
would be useful.  As it is, info is only usful for people who
use it often enough to make it worth the effort to learn the
interface (without forgetting it again before the next time
it is needed).


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