It's ancient (Emacs had hypertext way before the Web existed), but, for some purposes, it can be much more efficient than anything in a Web browser.
info (i.e. TexInfo) is great, but back in the 90s, there was a push in the GNU world to move from man pages to info entirely. Annoyingly, during that time lots of GNU man pages would tell you to look at its info pages instead.
Me, and apparently others, were not thrilled. While info is technically superior, the "one page" format of a man page, at least to me, felt quicker and more convenient for quickly looking up something than info's hypertext. info might be better for dedicated reading of documentation (and I like using it in emacs for that), but perceived as less so when you quickly, say, want to look up a flag for ls.
This might be for complicated human reasons or even just habit... e.g. you can still do full text search in info pages across all subpages, both with the "info" command and in emacs' info mode: just hit the 's' key.
I'm not sure what the state today is, I can't remember when I was last pointed to info instead of man (and I think I dimly remember some announcement that this would stop). But I also largely moved more towards BSD derivates rather than Linux, so I can't be sure.
You can search and navigate with info very efficiently. In your case searching for 'flags' should quickly show the relevant info.
Maybe they are a better experience locally, but I never bothered to find out.
The patological fear that it appeared the info system had of ever producing a webpage with 200kb+ text on it, that I can search for and click links without delay essentially ruined the experience for me. Who cares if the download would take 5 seconds, when I would spend 20 minutes reading through it?
Yeah..
On the other side, "info cp" didn't bring up the _reference_ of cp for a frickin' loooong time. It was a usability nightmare for that reason, and that reason alone. Had it worked the way it's working now: bringing you to the command reference first, but allow to search the entire manual scope at once (and WORKING references!), I would have been SOLD from the first moment.
The fixed-width format is the last thing I wished would be removed. I disabled catpath and have full-width manpages, but I cannot do the same with info as the text is pre-formatted.
(EDIT: it's 4.4MB instead of 200KB though)
From my perspective:
- More difficult to search (single page manual is easy to ctrl-f, emacs built-in docs same)
- Difficult to read, styling plugins don't work well.
- MUCH more text on the screen at once. A single horizontal line is at least 2 separate contexts.
- Menu animations :(
- various styling errors (code blocks overlapping in safari for me)
- code copy also copies repl output... not very useful!
- font stylings reused but for different meanings
etc...
It feels like an interesting pet-project, but it doesn't feel like someone sat down and thought of a prioritized list of problems with the original documentation presentation... then fixed them.
It feels like someone wanted to try out some common web tropes on the emac docs.
Single page text is easy to search, but it can yield irrelevant results. Hierarchical organization can be problematic, but it does give important clues to the organization of the content. Like a table of contents vs an index.
BTW, the site's search function seems to work pretty well.
If common web tropes are what some folks are used to learning with, all the better then!
A major part of the problem is that Emacs development is completely captured by the, shall we say, esoteric personality of its original author.
Emacs is a political project first and foremost—this much is clear. The focus is not on making the best possible text editor/programmable environment. In fact several proposed improvements have died on the drafting board because they would e.g. improve the experience of emacs users on OSX or Windows, and we can't have those users having a better UX than the people using emacs on underpowered Lemote netbooks with 10-inch screens running Trisquel without a GUI, now can we?
So, yes, Emacs sacrifices betterment in the name of ethical purity, and that's fine. It's their codebase to do with what they will.
But there is an enormous disconnect, because if emacs is a political project (and it is), then surely its goal must be to convert more people to their cause? To increase the size of their flock?
Of course emacs' original author is also exactly the wrong person you want for that sort of task, because he makes odious and repugnant remarks about all manner of subjects, he harasses women and holds disturbing views about bestiality and pedophilia. This man, who seemingly hasn't the self-awareness to realize his behavior directly hurts the credibility of his cause, is who the FSF apparently wants as the banner man leading their cause, and to whose judgment on many issues the emacs developers defer.
But I believe there is a sizable component of the emacs userbase that likes emacs as an editor but wishes someone would create the canonical/sanctioned fork of emacs that dispenses with all the gross Stallman stuff and focuses on just being a good editor, so that we can have mailing list discussions without worrying about what some gross creepy old man who hasn't written a line of code in 20 years and eats his toenails on live television thinks about per-pixel scrolling.
Anyways, to circle back to the point, I believe it's this latter part of the community that submits things like TFA, because they genuinely believe that emacs (the software) is awesome but in need of some love, but the emacs developers seem uninterested in making emacs more appealing to new users so we end up with websites for documentation instead of new features.
I'm trying to train myself to use Emacs internal docs more, but I frequently resort to searches in Firefox. I use Emacs daily, but still don't find their Help format particularly intuitive, though it might help to use it more.
You can't even rely on web versions of package manuals because the most updated and relevant is always the one in your editor.
(xterm-mouse-mode 1)
I would consider accepting Nobel-prize for this discovery.
(global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-4>") 'scroll-down-line)
(global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-5>") 'scroll-up-line)Ah, also, info+ is nice, too. Both the Emacs manual and Elisp reference manual are available as info books, under C-h i. info+ adds syntax highlighting to code snippets, improves search and navigation, and supports bookmarks.
I just worry that the documentation won't be kept up to date. Also, its nice to have versioned documentation available.
But generally looks like a potentially useful addition to other documentation output formats: they are supposed to be usable with different setups and under different conditions, and covering different preferences seems useful too. Even the Emacs web page [1] is in that "modern" style now, after all.
good work whoever did that