Re: info-find-source

[Emanuel Berg]

OK, there seems to be a bit of confusion here
with respect to what I mean. So I'd like to
clarify a few thing. That said, I'm not saying
any of this to try to sway anyone. It is just
my POV.

First, I don't think info is bad in any way.
Actually, I think it is very good! To have
a uniform interface to documentation and to
have people add new pieces to it, in a uniform
way, which will then fit seamlessly, is great.
I encourage everyone who has written a larger
piece of software to do it, no doubt.

Markup and interconnectivity, if that is
a word, is also good. The man pages are both as
well and I never felt the need to browse the
groff source.

That the documentation comes with Emacs, or is
on-line (i.e., not on paper) - remember the
terrible Sierra On-Line adventure games? - is
also a good thing, even tho a web version is
also good. And because of the uniformity one
can easily use or write a tool that will
translate info material into HTML or whatever
format is desired.

The issue I have with info is that it is easy
to get lost when navigating all those node back
and forth in the tree structure, back and forth
in history, up to the parent and down to the
child until you are stuck at a leaf and you
still haven't found what you are looking for.
And you do all this with keys that you do not
use every day for editing.

Compare this to the man pages where this never
happens (because of less complexity), *or*
a plain text files, where by definition it
cannot ever happen.

But doesn't this mean the files will be very
long? Yes, and I don't have a problem with that
as this volume is linear, not broken down into
a complicated tree structure one has
to traverse to get to the rainbow's end.

The speed I've mentioned isn't the speed it
takes to execute a command, it the the general
speed of access, the human-computer interface
if you will, which again per definition (unless
your cognitive "humanity" differs from mine),
this will be much, much faster with text
because I edit text and code every day, using
the same functions and finger-habits, and no
matter how fluent an info user I'll ever be, it
could never, ever match that.

Also, how does info look to you guys? To me, it
looks like this:

    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/pics/info.png

The problems getting an overview what's going
on may be related to that, as well.

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