On 12/26/21 13:43, Gavin Smith wrote:
I just ran "emacs"
at the command line to see how long that took to start up, and I
counted 31 seconds for it to load up.
Wow. /usr/bin/emacs (i.e. not emacs-server) takes about half a second.
(OTOH I have recent laptop (bought this March) with lots of memory.)
Fact is, if you mandate using Emacs to access Texinfo documentation, a
lot of people just wouldn't bother. I think using Emacs as an Info
replacement is just a non-starter.
Fair enough. It was one idea for a possible solution.
In principle there is nothing to prevent extending the info reader to
read a restricted subset of HTML, just like it currently reads info files.
Especially since we control the generated HTML, so we can tweak it to
make it easier to parse (perhaps make it XML-compatible).
Or use some 3rd-party HTML-parser or text-mode browser like the old Lynx.
We don't have to solve all the issues at once, but the long-term plan
really needs to deprecate and then drop info format.
In any case, the importance and usefulness of a standalone info reader that
works
in a plain terminal is becoming less and less. (You can't have images,
you can't have math, etc etc. - though a few terminals do support images.)
Instead, an info-reading application that uses an embedded browser (such as
webkitgtk)
seems to make more sense.
--
--Per Bothner
p...@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/
