Michael Stone <[email protected]> writes: > On Fri, Oct 03, 2025 at 11:34:08AM +0200, Arsen Arsenović wrote: >>If you're open to it, may I suggest installing emacs documentation, from >>whatever distro you're using, and running: >> >> info '(info)Help' >> >>The file that you need to get installed is info.info >> >>The effect of this is the same as opening the info viewer and hitting >>'h' on your keyboard (that, as info tells you on startup, opens the >>tutorial). >> >>It should turn the info viewer from an foreign mess into something quite >>usable. > > No, it's still a foreign mess, with key combinations that are alien to > most users who started on computers in the past 30 years.
I don't disagree. Unfortunately, this isn't unique to 'info'. Nearly everything on Unix-like systems is alien to most users who started on computers in the past 30 years. In classes, I have to teach how to operate 'man', commands lines, terminals, shells, and pretty much every other aspect of the non-graphical UIs possible on our beloved systems, same as 'info'. > The users have voted on this with their keyboards and simply don't > like and won't use it, despite GNU trying to convince them for decades > that it's great. Is it really a valid vote if there's missing documentation? > Changing the documentation a little bit isn't going to change that: > it's still asking users to learn a complex new system (not useful for > the *vast* majority of software they use) before getting help on the > problem they're actually trying to solve. Missing documentation being made present is not "a little bit" of change. I'm not sure what complexity you're referring to. People figure out vims help system fine, and it is nearly identical qualitatively (well, except that distros don't forget to install documentation on how to use it). > And pinfo has shown that while making the key combinations more > consistent with the larger non-emacs ecosystem helps a bit, it's still > more complexity than people want to deal with. According to popcon, 30880 users installed 'info', 1170 install 'pinfo'. I have no reason to believe that 'pinfo' proves anything as a result. In either case, I do agree that it'd be nice to have, for instance, a graphical interface to the same (which would not be as foreign to users who started on computers in the past 30 years). KDE has made a start in this area, KDEs Help Center can render 'info' documents, but the implementation is visibly unfinished (and I don't blame them, as you say it's relatively little documentation). -- Arsen Arsenović
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
