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  • Re: The Bash =?utf-8?Q?Hacker=E2=80=99s?= Wiki

    From Kenny McCormack@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Thu Aug 28 05:33:59 2025
    In article <[email protected]d>,
    Keith Thompson <[email protected]> wrote: >[email protected] (Richard) writes:
    [...]
    Of all the Free Software Foundation/GNU projects, Info is the biggest
    abomination.

    I'm actually interested in *why* you dislike Info. You might think the >reasons are obvious, but they're not obvious to me.

    Speaking only for myself, of course, but the problem is that it is neither
    fish nor fowl. I don't know what problem it was trying to solve.

    That is, I know what the point of "man" is. And I know what the point of
    HTML is. But I don't know what the point of "info" is. And, no, I'm not asking for a tutorial; these are rhetorical "I don't know"s.

    Info seems to be trying to be both - badly. Also, the keyboard interface
    of the standard "info" program (on all the systems I have tried it on) is dreadful. I can never get it to work effectively.

    It seems to be creating yet another standard. See the famous XKCD about
    "Now there are 15 incompatible standards". Now there's just one more place
    you have to look to find stuff. See my comments about how putting stuff in "info" has caused the GAWK "man" page to be diluted.

    --
    This is the GOP's problem. When you're at the beginning of the year
    and you've got nine Democrats running for the nomination, maybe one or
    two of them are Dennis Kucinich. When you have nine Republicans, seven
    or eight of them are Michelle Bachmann.

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  • From Nuno Silva@21:1/5 to Richard on Thu Aug 28 10:39:46 2025
    On 2025-08-27, Richard wrote:

    [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

    [email protected] (Kenny McCormack) spake the secret code <108ima1$192n6$[email protected]> thusly:

    In article <108ij2o$18u16$[email protected]>, Richard <> wrote:
    Of all the Free Software Foundation/GNU projects, Info is the biggest >>>abomination.

    I don't disagree. I think info was a failure to launch (*).

    FFS, just say you agree instead of being passive aggressive.

    You don't understand logic, do you? If you can't grasp the concept of
    the absence of disagreement not being agreement, then perhaps computer
    science is going to be a challenging topic for you, as some basic
    concepts will require understanding precisely this distinction...

    --
    Nuno Silva

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  • From Kenny McCormack@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Thu Aug 28 11:45:36 2025
    In article <108p852$17rs2$[email protected]>,
    Nuno Silva <[email protected]d> wrote:
    ...
    FFS, just say you agree instead of being passive aggressive.

    You don't understand logic, do you? If you can't grasp the concept of
    the absence of disagreement not being agreement, then perhaps computer >science is going to be a challenging topic for you, as some basic
    concepts will require understanding precisely this distinction...

    Point of order: There *is* a difference between "I agree" and "I don't disagree" - you cannot simply apply computer science/boolean logic
    principles to this and conclude that they mean exactly the same thing.

    I explained this all in detail in my previous post on this thread.

    But as Janis notes, fine granulatity of meaning is lost on the current generation.

    --
    That's the Trump playbook. Every action by Trump or his supporters can
    be categorized as one (or more) of:

    outrageous, incompetent, or mentally ill.

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  • From Richard@21:1/5 to All on Thu Aug 28 18:10:00 2025
    [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

    Keith Thompson <[email protected]> spake the secret code <[email protected]d> thusly:

    [email protected] (Richard) writes:
    [...]
    Of all the Free Software Foundation/GNU projects, Info is the biggest
    abomination.

    I'm actually interested in *why* you dislike Info. You might think the >reasons are obvious, but they're not obvious to me.

    - it forces me into a GNU emacs like viewer in order to find information;
    the assumption is that everyone likes the emacs style of interaction
    and everyone is familiar with it.

    man pages use your existing PAGER

    - it subdivides everything into very tiny sections (in all fairness,
    this could be an author style guide problem and not something
    intrinsic to info per se)

    This leads to information being balkanized into tiny sections and
    forces you to navigate between them instead of just pressing
    SPACEBAR to scroll down in the document or use your PAGER's search
    commands for locating text.

    - It assumes that those people wishing to view the document as a whole
    have access to LaTeX, etc., and are willing to process the document as
    such.

    man pages are typically preformatted into something your PAGER can
    scrub through without the user having to know anything about the man
    macro package, *roff processors, etc.

    There's probably some more things but those are the ones off the top
    of my head.

    Basically they made an inferior replacement to an existing mechanism
    and as near as I can tell the only reason is a "not invented here"
    syndrome because at the time there were no open source implementations
    of *roff.
    --
    "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
    The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
    The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
    Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

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  • From Richard@21:1/5 to All on Thu Aug 28 18:14:05 2025
    [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

    [email protected] (Kenny McCormack) spake the secret code <108pfh0$1lv85$[email protected]> thusly:

    But as Janis notes, fine granulatity of meaning is lost on the current >generation.

    It's just passive aggressive argumentation rather than "fine
    granularity".

    Passive aggressive disagreement does not constitute an argument.
    --
    "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
    The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
    The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
    Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

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  • From phako@21:1/5 to Richard on Fri Aug 29 07:05:20 2025
    [email protected] (Richard) writes:


    [...]

    This leads to information being balkanized into tiny sections and
    forces you to navigate between them instead of just pressing
    SPACEBAR to scroll down in the document or use your PAGER's search
    commands for locating text.
    In INFO when you just press the SPACEBAR, it indeed scrolls down through
    the whole document and the extremly complicated and obscur command to
    search the whole document is C-s. You seem to have a strong opinion on something you're not curious about. Just say you don't care and move
    on. And by the way the MAN's pager has also some commands that 99% people
    will never use.

    [...]

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  • From phako@21:1/5 to Keith Thompson on Fri Aug 29 09:24:29 2025
    Keith Thompson <[email protected]> writes:


    [...]


    Richard listed the things he dislikes about Info *because I asked him
    to*. And it's hardly surprising that someone who dislikes a tools isn't going to have taken the time to learn all its features. BTW, both '/'
    and Ctrl-S perform searches in the "info" command, with some subtle differences.
    I'm glad that you doesn't mind that his "technical" argument are based on his lack of knowledge of how Info works but I don't disagree with him
    expressing his opinion just him being wrong, saying it doesn't do
    something when it does, implying that all softwares should behave and
    have the same keyboard shortcut for the same functions, a principle that
    nobody holds anymore when it goes against their personnal preferences
    (eg: I don't know one VI guy that put bash in VI mode, me included).
    Just says it doesn't interest you or suit your personal preference,
    there is no shame in that.

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