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Comment by libele | Hacker News Reader

the openbsd manuals usually have examples. you can see how compact https://man.openbsd.org/grep.1 is compared to the gnu grep manual.

i've been using https://git.causal.agency/exman/about/ to compare linux and bsd manpages, and it has saved me an incredible amount of time looking things up.

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perhaps gnu's manpages suffer because they focused so much effort on their info pages.

Are info pages still a thing? I remember being very confused by them back when I started out with Linux, and eventually just stopped trying to understand how they worked.

They are, but my impression is that only Emacs users use them to some extent. (Emacs has a built-in info reader that is better than the standalone client, and ships mainly info pages as its documentation.) Outside of Emacs, I’d say very few people know info is even a thing, and I remember some Linux distributions also stripped info pages from packages since everyone used man pages.

More than better, people doesn't know how to use GNU Info correctly.

In fairness, if one were to come to more, pg, or less with no prior knowledge of the conventions, the madness of some of the character choices would be just as grating.

Ironically, this sort of stuff -- the basic conventions like qhjkl0^$G + CRFFBSSPC keyboard navigation and :/? prompt modes -- is exactly what one initially learns from guides, tutorials, other people in IRC, and whatnot, long before coming to reference doco. The _Introduction to Linux_ book at TLDP covers the bare essentials of these conventions, q, b, and SPC, in the "quickstart" chapter 2.

* https://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/sect_02_03.html

Every time I could not find and answer to a question in a man page and consulted info, it was a waste of time. I like info, really, but the remark at the end of most GNU man pages to look at the info pages is misleading at best.

For emacs stuff, yes, it's very convenient. I remember once upon a time, Python docs were available in info as well. When you have good documentation available in info, it's very nice.

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