Re: the defaults for `info`

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:47:48 +0200
> From: Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden>
> Cc: Karl Berry <address@hidden>
> 
> Karl Berry wrote:
> > [...] I'm not sure we can feasibly [make] info.texi
> > completely standalone.  I wouldn't want to repeat all the info in
> > the Emacs manual, [...]
> 
> That may be the price to pay for pushing info pages plus an info 
> reader into the hands of unsuspecting GNU users.  The alternative 
> is to also provide good and complete man pages with all GNU 
> packages.

I don't see why the GNU project needs to provide duplicate sets of
documentation.  A good Info manual (please don't use "info pages", as
there's no such thing) should have a section on command-line arguments
that should provide at least the same information as a man page would.
And the standalone Info reader has the --usage command-line that
should get you to that section, i.e. "info --usage FOO" should perform
the same mission as "man FOO".

Please also note that info.texi is NOT the documentation of the
standalone Info reader, although it describes some of its features.
info.texi is the documentation of the _Info_documentation_system_ in
general.  As such, it describes its most important features that are
mostly independent of the reader.

If you want the manual of the standalone reader specifically, please
use the info-stnd.texi (i.e. type at the shell prompt "info -f info-stnd"
or "info 'info standalone'").  If you use the --usage option, you will
get the man-style description of how to invoke the reader.

> If the full 
> documentation is only available as info pages, then at least 
> provide an info reader that behaves as much as possible as the most 
> popular pager: PageUp and PageDown should by default be bound to 
> scroll-backward and scroll-forward, and not to the page-only 
> varieties, scroll-step should default to 1, cursor-movement-scrolls 
> should be On, and at-end-of-document should be Stop, ...

Did you try the --vi-keys option?  If not, please try, I think you
will like it.  It was added for the sake of users who, like you,
wanted keybindings similar to Less and other pagers.