GNU Info – What is GNU Info For?

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I understand what GNU Info is and how to use it, but what is it for? Why does it exist in parallel to the man pages? Why not write detailed man pages rather than provide a separate utility?

Best Answer

GNU Info was designed to offer documentation that was comprehensive, hyperlinked, and possible to output to multiple formats.

Man pages were available, and they were great at providing printed output. However, they were designed such that each man page had a reasonably small set of content. A man page might have the discussion on a single C function such as printf(3), or would describe the ls(1) command.

That breaks down when you get into larger systems. How would you fit the documentation for Emacs into man pages? An example of the problem is the Perl man page, which lists 174 separate man pages you can read to get information. How do you browse through that, or do a search to find out what && means?

As an improvement over man pages, Info gave us:

  1. The ability to have a single document for a large system, which contains all the information about that system. (versus 174 man pages)
  2. Ability to do full-text search across the entire document (v. man -k which only checks keywords)
  3. Hyperlinks to different parts of the same or different documents (v. The See Also section, which was made into hyperlinks by some, but not all, man page viewers)
  4. An index for the document, which could be browsed or you could hit "i" and type in a term and it would search the index and take you to the right place (v. Nothing)
  5. Linear document browsing across concepts, allowing you read the previous and next sections if you want to, either by mouse or keystroke (v. Nothing).

Is it still relevant? Nowadays most people would say "This documentation doesn't belong in a manpage" and would put it in a PDF or would put it up in HTML. In fact, the help systems on several OSes are based on HTML. However, when GNU Info was created (1986), HTML didn't exist yet. Nowadays texinfo allows you to create PDF, Info, or other formats, so you can use those formats if you want.

That's why GNU Info was invented.

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