I’ve always struggled with the search command in info. Hitting / and the keyword then tapping next in man is easy. Info’s search always gets me tangled up, probably because I don’t use it enough to remember the keybinds.
Ctrl-S starts an I-search, instead of /. You then start typing what you want to search for. The results immediately appear; you don’t have to press enter. This will search across the docs for an entire project—with man, you may have to dig around with apropos first to find what you are looking for.
You can then hit Ctrl-S again to go to the next search occurrence, hit enter to stay where you are and exit the search, or Ctrl-G to exit the search and go back to where you started.
That's a big if. And I'm not going to learn to navigate an emacs system for a few utilities that I don't use much when everything that I do care about is on man.
You’d equally not learn how to navigate Javadoc if you don’t write Java code. Seems pretty obvious to me.
I get that info is a little easier if you are used to Emacs keybindings. But if you use info, you’d mostly just use space / backspace, ctrl-s for search, m for menu, and u for up. It’s not a lot of keybindings that you’re probably going to end up using. Yeah, info has M-x, but who ever uses it? Everyone who used man for the first time had to learn those keybindings too.
The few times I ventured into info pages, I found the information scattered and hard to skim because it was divided up inconveniently.
While it is true that I must have learned the keybindings for man at one point, they are the same as the keybindings for vi and less. Both of which I frequently used for unrelated purposes, and so were firmly in my muscle memory.
info <whatever> | less