Well.. I guess I have been living under a rock. Today is the first time to have heard of info. I have been using man for well over 2 decades now.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Surprising you haven't come across a man page that basically says "We couldn't be bothered putting everything in here, check out the info page on it instead."
I feel like I find myself on one of those every 6 months or so.
That's funny, I had the opposite experience. When I found out that info was the GNU projects recommended way of documentation, I was all on board. Then I tried using it, and it couldn't find most CLI software I used. So I downloaded the texinfo archives... and that still lacked probably 50% of the commands I tried to look up.
Then I searched up how to get info pages for this or that tool, and someone on StackOverflow had said that it was woefully incomplete and outdated at this point.
I think I'll give it another try and report back
9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (https://tldr.sh/). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.
Please remove the exclamation mark before your link, you are making it an image that obviously can't be loaded.
Oops, thanks for the heads up! No idea where that came from
Info is supposedly more modern, like a website. But it’s unusable and as annoying as emacs. Man is good enough.
Why the emacs hate?
You can find something annoying and not hate it. Linux itself is annoying in so many ways, yet I love it.
I love emacs and I used it a lot with org-mode, but you need weeks to master it, and it's a PITA to configure.
One offers info, the other mansplains /S
man is standard Unix manual pages, while info is a documentation format introduced/popularised by GNU. info pages usually have a lot more information (sometimes including tutorials, guided examples, links to different pages and sections, etc (depending on the project maintainer obviously)) but man pages are the standard and basically everything has one. If you run info [program] for something without a dedicated info page, it will show the man page instead.
My impression
tldr/cheat: Explains most popular arguments using as little words as possible
man: Explains the entire command using a more technical tone
info: Explains the entire command in slightly more informal tone. Can feel wordier as a result, but on the flipside it connects alternative/related commands in a logical way
I completely forgot about info.
There's also whatis for short summaries
And don't forget apropos. I can't remember what it does, though.
It's just the same thing as man -k.
I've been using this one pretty often lately
Personally I’m a fan of cheat.sh
For instance to get info on curl you can:
curl cheat.sh/curl
I since switched to tldr (for the offline/caching functionality, I think?), but for the longest time I just used a wrapper function that did exactly this in my shell configuration. Something a bit like this:
function cheatsh() {
curl cheat.sh/"\$1"
}