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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

The search in info is way better than the search in man. Check out info info for the docs.

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.

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I think the core problem is that it’s not /, which many have muscle memory for

You can still use / if you like.

Yes, if you like emacs, then I'm sure it is fine.

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.

Sure, content is king, as they say. If you spend all your time using tools/libraries/APIs with good man pages, then use man. If you spend your time using GCC, Make, Bison, etc., then you’d be better off learning info.

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.

I spent my early developer life using Perl. Which had perldoc pages that were mirrored to man pages.

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.

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