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What is the differences between "man" and "info" command
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Linux
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The "info" thing was a misguided attempt by a crazed bunch of emacs zealots to usurp the rightful position of "man". Probably GNU's worst idea. It persisted in having some popularity for a decade or more but is now mostly forgotten I think. Despite having used Debian for the past ten years straight I've only just now found out that info doesn't even get installed by default any more.
Eh, to be honest, manpages aren't particularly good as either documentation or quick references (hence the popularity of tldr), and info is intended primarily for the sort of long-form, comprehensive documentation that would be awkward to fit in a manpage. Also, texinfo documents can easily be exported to HTML, so one format can be used for both online and offline docs. It's an admirable effort, if nothing else.
I'd have liked it a lot better if it had been intended and used as a place to put the more extensive documentation that isn't really appropriate for a man page, while leaving the man pages as they were. Instead, I learned about it back in the day by being frequently annoyed at missing man pages for basic tools, which had been replaced with suggestions to look at 'info' instead, which always seemed to be much less concise and have a worse UI.
I wasn't a huge fan of manpages either until I got a kernel class at uni. The man pages for syscalls and library calls are super well made.
Actually sadly remember python-docs provided as info document.