Re: Documentation on the command-line?

[Emanuel Berg]

Sharon Kimble <boudiccas@skimble.plus.com> writes:

> I'm trying to find the documentation of "fancyhdr",
> part of "Texlive", and I've tried man fancyhdr, info
> fancyhdr, show fancyhdr.
>
> but its failing on all of them.

Yes :)

man are the Unix manpages and they deal with Unix tools
as well as Unix C programming because of their common
history not to say symbiosis to this very day.

info was the documentation project of the GNU people,
it is hypertext just like the Internet (and the man
pages, but the man much less so) - the interface of
info is more bulky than the default for the man pages,
which is why those are preferred by most (not all)
people then and now. When the internet hit big, I would
suspect some steam went of the info project.

What is show?

There is a man page for Emacs, and 'info emacs' gets
you the Emacs FAQ. By the way, note how similar info
looks to Emacs. As for man (as a tool), it is an
interface to the pager less, I would think.

As for packages, the kind you install on your computer,
if you are on Debian or Ubuntu or some or their zillion
forks, you can get an idea with 'aptitude show' - I
wouldn't call this "documentation", though, but
sometimes good URLs and the like can be found.

> So how do I get the documentation for an emacs or a
> latex package to show on the command-line please?

With Emacs stuff, there is no reason to use the shell
for that, use the very elaborate
online-and-dynamic-and-associated help system (not on
paper, and immediately updated, and written next to the
code it relates to). But don't you know that already?!
If not, I have news for you :)

describe-function
describe-mode
describe-variable
etc. (For more: `C-h ?' for help-for-help)

Or hit `C-h k' and then whatever key - cool, isn't it?

For LaTeX, there is something called "TeX by Topic" as
well as the CLI tool tlmgr - go fish :)

--
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573