This made me remember something I haven't thought about in a long time:
info (i.e. TexInfo) is great, but back in the 90s, there was a push in the GNU world to move from man pages to info entirely. Annoyingly, during that time lots of GNU man pages would tell you to look at its info pages instead.
Me, and apparently others, were not thrilled. While info is technically superior, the "one page" format of a man page, at least to me, felt quicker and more convenient for quickly looking up something than info's hypertext. info might be better for dedicated reading of documentation (and I like using it in emacs for that), but perceived as less so when you quickly, say, want to look up a flag for ls.
This might be for complicated human reasons or even just habit... e.g. you can still do full text search in info pages across all subpages, both with the "info" command and in emacs' info mode: just hit the 's' key.
I'm not sure what the state today is, I can't remember when I was last pointed to info instead of man (and I think I dimly remember some announcement that this would stop). But I also largely moved more towards BSD derivates rather than Linux, so I can't be sure.
This is hilarious in modern context. So much documentation is effectively "what stack overflow has" that worrying about "man versus info" feels like a distraction.
I'd say a bit sad more than hilarious, sad for modern times I mean... you have an easily accessible, curated, well-thought and organized doc base where you could learn a lot more other than solving your little problem at hand, but you still resort to subpar answers on a qa website
But somebody has to write those Stackoverflow answers. Perhaps for those who do the distinction between man pages and info is important. Or do you think that the source of Stackoverflow answers is just more Stackoverflow answers? Now that would be hilarious.
I wouldn't even mind GNU documentation moving to TexInfo, but I have repeatedly found man pages telling me to invoke "info <some-command>" only to then find there was no texinfo documentation for that command. It's not a huge problem, but every now and then, it's annoying.
> info might be better for dedicated reading of documentation (and I like using it in emacs for that), but perceived as less so when you quickly, say, want to look up a flag for ls.
You can search and navigate with info very efficiently. In your case searching for 'flags' should quickly show the relevant info.
Yeah, I also mentioned how I wasn't sure how well founded that argument is.
On the other hand, especially for man pages that are not huge, you can get a good grasp and overview by just scrolling linearly through the man page. At least for me, who tends to think very visually, I then have the impression I got a better feeling for the structure and covered content of the document than if it was hierarchical. (Again, this breaks down once the document gets too large.)
Overall, that annoyed "oh gosh, I just wanted a quick scroll through the man page" feeling when encountering a man page that was just a stub for the info document probably comes from somewhere after all.
I always hated info pages because they were so dog slow (or felt that way) to navigate. So many clicks and often a page would have only a few paragraphs on it.
Maybe they are a better experience locally, but I never bothered to find out.
The patological fear that it appeared the info system had of ever producing a webpage with 200kb+ text on it, that I can search for and click links without delay essentially ruined the experience for me. Who cares if the download would take 5 seconds, when I would spend 20 minutes reading through it?
I love/hate info. On one side, info can be more than a manual page, and contain _usable_ references. I suppose you know about the "all in one" manpage bundles such as ffmpeg-all and zshall which are there just so you can search?
Yeah..
On the other side, "info cp" didn't bring up the _reference_ of cp for a frickin' loooong time. It was a usability nightmare for that reason, and that reason alone. Had it worked the way it's working now: bringing you to the command reference first, but allow to search the entire manual scope at once (and WORKING references!), I would have been SOLD from the first moment.
The fixed-width format is the last thing I wished would be removed. I disabled catpath and have full-width manpages, but I cannot do the same with info as the text is pre-formatted.
It's ancient (Emacs had hypertext way before the Web existed), but, for some purposes, it can be much more efficient than anything in a Web browser.