Tim <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 08:13 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
> Ah yes, the info/man conundrum. Man has the nice interface but the
> man page doesn't have the information. The info-text file has the
> information but info has the world's worst interface. Have mercy and
> recommend using pinfo instead of info.
To be honest, I couldn't really see pinfo offering me anything better
(both seemed awful), other than colour highlighting of the interactive
bits (which, otherwise, you have to find by a bit of guesswork).
You still have a painful hop, skip, and a jump, method of traversing a
document. And they don't seem to understand the concept of going
backwards means going to back to the prior screen, not the top of the
page of the prior bit you were reading. Grrr, read page, jump to
another page, go back, scroll back down the first page to where you were
up to, carry on reading and following links.
"yelp info:grub" was far less painful to navigate, though it's a GUI
tool (rather like using a web page with frames - navigational links in a
border, the content in the adjacent page).
For me, info's navigation is kind of like using vi back in the day when
you used h, j, k, and l to move the cursor around which meant you
couldn't move the cursor in insert mode and pretty much everything else
was just as counterintuitive. At least the emacs key bindings have some
mnemonic value. pinfo is more like vim. The arrow keys, page up, page
down, etc. work so the navigation is, by comparison, fairly intuitive.
pinfo may not do exactly what you want but at least the navigation makes
sense.
I try to keep alternate application recommendations within an
application class so curses based pinfo still runs in a dumb terminal
just like man and info. Once you jump to a GUI presentation, you may as
well just Google for "grub howto" or whatever you need.
Cheers,
Dave
--
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce
