On: Simplified and community-driven man pages

[mjw1007]

As far as the content and organisation goes, they're basically doing everything right that manpages do wrong.

They separate tutorial and reference documentation, don't collapse under their own weight when they get large, and have a way to find the documentation for a particular short option.

The original standalone terminal reader was pretty poor, though. These days use pinfo or the html version if you're not an emacs user.

For a good example, compare `man sed` with `pinfo sed`.

[jwilk → mjw1007]

> have a way to find the documentation for a particular short option

How?

[mjw1007 → jwilk]

There's an index, usually a separate one for command-line options.

For example in the sed info pages it's under "Command and Option Index" at the bottom of the top-level menu.

And, at least in the emacs viewer, there's a keyboard shortcut so you can just type something like « i - n » to see the docs for -n.

[jwilk → mjw1007]

"i" works also in stand-alone info. I was hoping pinfo can do this too, but I can't see such functionality. :(