Tim Harig <user...@ilthio.net> writes: > When the GNU folk decided to clone *nix they decided that they knew > better and simply decided to create their own interfaces.
This isn't the case. Actually Info has a long history prior to GNU: it was the way that the documentation was presented at the MIT AI lab. In fact, Info was used rather like a modern wiki. The operating system they used, called ITS, didn't have a concept of file permissions, and users were encouraged to improve documentation (and programs). The original Info viewer was implemented in Emacs (which also originated in ITS, years before GNU). Texinfo was a GNU innovation: the idea that you could build both the Info document and a nice printable manual from a single source was novel, as was the application to Unix. But, since Stallman was documenting large software systems like Emacs and GCC, it doesn't seem unreasonable to provide manuals which are somewhat more discursive and leisurely than traditional Unix manpages. I have a printed copy of the GNU Emacs 18 manual (from 1987): it's almost 300 pages long. The modern manual for Emacs 23 is several /times/ larger than this. Man pages don't scale that well. I do agree it's annoying that the official coreutils documentation is in Texinfo. > Actually, the left arrow key does not work at all intuitively. One > would expect that it should go back to the previous page as it would > in lynx, etc. It does not. It moves the cursor so you can hit links. The l key takes you back through your recent viewing history -- and has done for thirty years. > By tradition 'n' and 'p' are broken for scrolling in a page. 'b' is > often used in place of p but that seems to take one back to the top of > the page. Space and backspace are an older tradition. > The s key for a search is another example that has already been > discussed. I find C-s more useful in Info, because it searches interactively. I frequently get muddled when I try to search in `modern' programs like web browsers, because they've gratuitously made C-s try to save the page (something one hardly ever wants to do) rather than search. (Finding is different: finding is what happens at the end of a /successful/ search. So C-f is poorly chosen.) -- [mdw] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
