Hi,
I saw there https://askubuntu.com/questions/9325/what-is-the-difference-between-man-and-info-documentation that info is “better” than man because is outdated. Still right in 2023 ?
Well… I guess I have been living under a rock. Today is the first time to have heard of info. I have been using man for well over 2 decades now.
Surprising you haven’t come across a
man
page that basically says “We couldn’t be bothered putting everything in here, check out theinfo
page on it instead.”I feel like I find myself on one of those every 6 months or so.
That’s funny, I had the opposite experience. When I found out that
info
was the GNU projects recommended way of documentation, I was all on board. Then I tried using it, and it couldn’t find most CLI software I used. So I downloaded the texinfo archives… and that still lacked probably 50% of the commands I tried to look up.Then I searched up how to get info pages for this or that tool, and someone on StackOverflow had said that it was woefully incomplete and outdated at this point.
I think I’ll give it another try and report back
The “info” thing was a misguided attempt by a crazed bunch of emacs zealots to usurp the rightful position of “man”. Probably GNU’s worst idea. It persisted in having some popularity for a decade or more but is now mostly forgotten I think. Despite having used Debian for the past ten years straight I’ve only just now found out that info doesn’t even get installed by default any more.
Just because it’s theirs? I figured it would be because of an alleged gender issue, for the same reason some are trying to do away with whitelists/blacklists and the like.
9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (https://tldr.sh/). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.
Please remove the exclamation mark before your link, you are making it an image that obviously can’t be loaded.
Oops, thanks for the heads up! No idea where that came from
I completely forgot about info.
There’s also whatis for short summaries
I’ve been using this one pretty often lately