Re: [groff] An alternative to info(1) ?

[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2020 17 Feb 07:59 -0600, Mike Bianchi wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 16, 2020 at 07:55:31PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > I *hate* info.  It has made Linux less available to a lot of people.
> 
> BUT info sometimes has information that man(1) lacks.
> 
> So _maybe_ an approach would be to make an  info2(1)  command that had access
> to the same information with a different terminal interface.
> 
> Or a dialog interface.
> 
>       So my question is does any have experience with a terminal
>       walk-the-decision-tree interface they like?
> 
>       Could it serve as a model for  info2 ?

I have used oinfo for a long time.  It has an interface much like lynx
where up/down arrows scroll and highlight links and the rigth arrow
follows the link to the next page.  The left arrow goes back to the
previous page.

If an info page does not exist then pinfo will load a man page if
available and highlight references to other man pages so one can jump to
them and back again.  Unfortunately, bold and italic formatting appears
to be tossed away so I don't regard it an ideal man viewer.

My biggest gripe about texinfo is that its indexing seems to be quite
fragile and there always seem to be many more info files installed in
the system than will show in the Emacs index.  Then there are info files
that are locally built that won't show up without a lot of tinkering.
Perhaps no one actually cares, but it was one of the reasons I retired
using texinfor for a project and went to man(7).

- Nate

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