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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised when I learned `make` and how simple it mostly is. Unfortunately it eschews man-pages in favor of info-pages which were not as pleasant to learn how to use, just to learn how to use `make`.

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Any time you want to groan about a tool's use of info, see if the BSDs have a similar tool. Most GNU tools simply implement an ancient UNIX tool so it's not like GNU has a monopoly on them. So in this case see FreeBSD make:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=make&sektion=1

which points you to this:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/pmake/

But really, if you just hate using info(1), always remember that GNU also puts the pages on the web in HTML multichunks, HTML one big page, and PDF, so there's no reason to dodge a GNU tool just because you hate info(1).

https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/

Another option, if you're an Emacs user, is to read it in Emacs. Emacs's info reader is very good.

If someone's argument is that info is hard to learn, it's pretty unlikely they're also an Emacs user (the standalone info uses emacs keybindings by default).

pinfo is an easier to use viewer for info files (it tries to adopt a lynx-like style).

Or put something like this into a shell script or function:

    info --subnodes "$@" 2>&1 | less

and info(1) output will look a lot like man(1) output.

The info-pages are probably fine if you already know emacs. Otherwise they're not worth bothering with, as it's all in nicely-formatted web pages now.

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