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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

The manpage format is a ridiculous relic of a more limited era.

Have you ever tried finding anything the the Bash manpage? It's the whole book! In one manpage!! For many tools, not just Bash, I often just use google to search the manpage, which really demonstrates a failure of our documentation tools.

And GNU's documentation is excellent. Isn't it a requirement for some of their projects (Emacs?) that a feature must be documented to be accepted?

With that said, Info's (the CLI command) UX seems to be a spin-off of Emacs, and just as obtuse to the new user. I'd accuse linux users of being hidebound for sticking to manpages, but Info is really challenging to navigate. I mean, xkcd.com/1343 has a point.

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> The manpage format is a ridiculous relic of a more limited era.

If you read the thread, you will see the claim: ”Info pages are older than man pages (the format dates back to ITS on the PDP-10).” - by a guy, going by the handle @amszmidt - so they’re both, from the same ‘limited era’, near enough.

> Have you ever tried finding anything the the [sic] Bash manpage?

Yes, all the time. The beauty of Unix style man pages, is they rely on the user(s) native $PAGER - so the search capabilities, are dependent upon what one chooses, for such - rather than the incredibly clunky, GNU thingy, that comes bundled with the info system, unfortunately…

Unix man pages, are also excellent - as they haven’t been deliberately crippled, in order to try and forcefeed us the info gruel… - in much the same way, that GNU Guile, was chosen as the “official” extension language, over TCL, for political reasons.

You can use a web browser for the info pages, and you get some reasonable HTML when you export this.

I don’t see justification for saying that info is klunky. “I haven’t learned to use it” is valid, “I don’t want to learn another thing” is valid, but all the functionality that you want is right there at your fingertips. It’s not klunky just because it’s not exactly the same as your pager. And if you just want to use your pager, you can pipe info to your pager, you just lose the hyperlinks. Or you can keep the hyperlinks and use the web browser.

Unix man pages are excellent but most parts of Unix are small enough that the docs fit in man pages. Say what you will about the “Unix philosophy”, but the Unix reality is that we use a lot of programs where the docs are too large to fit reasonably into a man page. GCC, Bash, Make, Bison, Flex, etc. Some of these tools are heading the way of the dodo.

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