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that info is “better” than man because is outdated.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 ?
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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
manpage that basically says “We couldn’t be bothered putting everything in here, check out theinfopage 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
infowas 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how to get info pages for this or that tool, and someone on StackOverflow had said that it was woefully incomplete and outdated at this point.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
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
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.
Eh, to be honest, manpages aren’t particularly good as either documentation or quick references (hence the popularity of tldr), and info is intended primarily for the sort of long-form, comprehensive documentation that would be awkward to fit in a manpage. Also, texinfo documents can easily be exported to HTML, so one format can be used for both online and offline docs. It’s an admirable effort, if nothing else.
I’d have liked it a lot better if it had been intended and used as a place to put the more extensive documentation that isn’t really appropriate for a man page, while leaving the man pages as they were. Instead, I learned about it back in the day by being frequently annoyed at missing man pages for basic tools, which had been replaced with suggestions to look at ‘info’ instead, which always seemed to be much less concise and have a worse UI.
I wasn’t a huge fan of manpages either until I got a kernel class at uni. The man pages for syscalls and library calls are super well made.
Actually sadly remember python-docs provided as info document.
Can you provide any source that it was created or initiated by what you call ‘a crazed bunch of emacs zealots’, or that the goal was to ‘unsurp the rightful position of “man”’. Quite bold statements that are unlikely to be true imho.
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.
No, nothing to do with that sort of thing. The idea was that it’d be all hypertexty and therefore better.
Emacs zealot here … can confirm we’re like this ;)
One offers info, the other mansplains /S
Info is supposedly more modern, like a website. But it’s unusable and as annoying as emacs. Man is good enough.
Why the emacs hate?
You can find something annoying and not hate it. Linux itself is annoying in so many ways, yet I love it.
I love emacs and I used it a lot with org-mode, but you need weeks to master it, and it’s a PITA to configure.
man is standard Unix manual pages, while info is a documentation format introduced/popularised by GNU. info pages usually have a lot more information (sometimes including tutorials, guided examples, links to different pages and sections, etc (depending on the project maintainer obviously)) but man pages are the standard and basically everything has one. If you run
info [program]for something without a dedicated info page, it will show the man page instead.I completely forgot about info.
There’s also whatis for short summaries
I’ve been using this one pretty often lately
My impression
tldr/cheat: Explains most popular arguments using as little words as possible
man: Explains the entire command using a more technical tone
info: Explains the entire command in slightly more informal tone. Can feel wordier as a result, but on the flipside it connects alternative/related commands in a logical wayI since switched to
tldr(for the offline/caching functionality, I think?), but for the longest time I just used a wrapper function that did exactly this in my shell configuration. Something a bit like this:function cheatsh() { curl cheat.sh/"\$1" }
