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@krans they are better than man pages *in content*, the info viewer, on the other paw, is terrible.....

i unironically advocate for just using lynx or w3m or something on docs.jade.fyi in place of the info viewer.

@leftpaddotpy I read the info manuals in Emacs, alongside everything else I'm doing — that might have something to do with my experience.

@krans @leftpaddotpy Yah, one of the biggest problems with GNU info manuals is that the standalone info reader was written by people who knew and liked emacs' internal info browser, and thus it feels weird and off-putting to anyone who isn't an emacs fan—

—and everyone who *is* an emacs fan continued to prefer using its internal info browser, so the standalone tool was never really what *anyone* wanted and has been neglected.

I had a long conversation with @b0rk and @brainwane about this and related issues last year and some cool ideas came out of it but I dunno if any of us are going to ever have time to execute

@zwol @krans @b0rk @brainwane the easiest solution is to ship single page html docs as a separate package, abandon the info viewer, and replace it with w3m or lynx (and maybe fix all the build systems to make that not as horrifying as how docs.jade.fyi has to do it https://github.com/lf-/dotfiles/blob/main/docs-svc/default.nix )

@leftpaddotpy @krans @b0rk @brainwane not that simple because some people really *don't* want everything in one page, and also that loses the indexing

@zwol @krans @b0rk @brainwane something that would be very cheap and easy that would improve the status quo is whenever you have a man page that tells you to read an info page, giving a link to the online version (ideally corresponding to the same program version) with a note that it's the same content would help a lot.

though I'm not sure how many people see the end of the man pages.

@leftpaddotpy @zwol this is sort of a sidebar but I feel like there’s a… SEO issue? with this info documentation

like if i search “fish how to set environment variable” i get the fish official manual but I’ve searched for a LOT of things related to bash and i don’t think the official manual has ever come up as a result

@b0rk @leftpaddotpy Yeah I have no idea what's wrong with the SEO, the official web versions of the gnu manuals have been at stable URLs for decades, and it seems like they oughta have plenty of inbound links

@zwol @leftpaddotpy some other guesses for why I might have ignored gnu.org results in the past:

- the manuals on gnu.org don't seem to have internal search?
- it's technically possible to search "difference between single and double quotes in bash" and get to https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Quoting.html (it's the ~25th result for me), but when you click through, there's no indication at all on the page that this is the official bash reference manual. some screenshots of bash manual vs fish manual to compare:

@zwol @leftpaddotpy it feels like most software I use has some shared ideas of what an online software reference manual should look like (internal search, a sidebar with an index, etc), and the gnu.org manuals seem to play by totally different rules

@zwol @leftpaddotpy anyway I feel like (for me) it's not just that those things don't make the site hard to navigate

honestly I think I've probably seen those info pages and not even recognized at all that it's supposed to be the official bash reference manual, because it diverges so much from my expectations of what a manual is supposed to look like

@b0rk @leftpaddotpy ooh, this gives me some more ideas :)

Also another paragraph for the "Why GNU hasn't done much new since 2000" essay in my head that may see the light of day someday

@zwol @leftpaddotpy would love to read that if you ever write it!!