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Comment by glandium | Hacker News Reader

Even better: say, you've opened info for something and are lost in it, and try info info, what you get is a list of all the available info pages, preceded by (on my machine):

This is the Info main menu (aka directory node). A few useful Info commands:

  'q' quits;
  '?' lists all Info commands;
  'h' starts the Info tutorial;
  'mTexinfo RET' visits the Texinfo manual, etc.

You'd think that's helpful, but...

hitting '?' brings a "Regexp search backward" prompt...

hitting 'h' brings... (oh irony) the info man page (but it's displayed by info, not man), and the man page has absolutely no information about how this thing works. Only command line arguments.

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There appears to exist throughout the "standalone" Info viewer an assumption that you have Emacs globally installed. (I can't imagine why.) If you don't, you're stuck with whatever info documentation your distro packager and software developers provide, which usually is both not much and not good.

Anyway, here's throwanem's handy-dandy cheat sheet for Info navigation:

m - Select a currently displayed menu item, with partial entry and tab completion

p, n - Move to the previous and next sibling nodes at this level of the tree

u - Move to the parent of the currently displayed node

t - Move to the top level of the currently displayed manual (and u from here takes you back to the directory)

s - Search incrementally forward, with wrapping, by substring or (Emacs) regexp

C-r - Search incrementally backward, etc., etc.

l, r - Move back and forward, respectively, among the list of nodes you've visited this section

q - Exit the Info viewer

As you see, in a lot of ways Info navigation conceptually corresponds with that in a web browser, especially if itimplements the semantic navigation UI that never really got the love it deserved. (I don't think any current browsers have had that in core for a long time, but there is a Firefox extension that provides them, in the rare case that you actually browse pages which include the metainformation that UI needs in order to work.) But, unlike a browser, Info's UI is so undiscoverable as to be actively hostile to the task-focused user. If you often find yourself struggling with it, perhaps the information here might help.

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