Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

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.


Tip: open the "HTML single page" version: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/emacs.htm... and press Ctrl+F. Works really well.

(EDIT: it's 4.4MB instead of 200KB though)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: