info and man

[Allen Taylor]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 12:32:03AM -0400, John Macdonald wrote:
> 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).

EXACTLY! I so seldom use info that, when a case comes up where info is
the only local source of the docs I need, I just google for the docs
online instead - it's faster than re-learning yet again the bizarre (to
me, a vi user) keystrokes of info.

Allen
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