underrated life hack: if you read the manpages they tell you how things work

@astrid

"""
The full documentat for <what you wanted to look up> is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info program is properly installed at your site, the command

info <what you wanted to look up>

should give you access to the complete manual.
"""

@oblomov @astrid Oh god, texinfo. Alongside kpathsea and autoconf, things I remember making working life a trivial bit more irritating and miserable.

@chiffchaff @oblomov @astrid

If you haven't encountered it yet, info(1) detects if output isn't a terminal, giving the entire document in one go, so you can make it MUCH more usable with

$ info $THING | less

to just get a dump of the whole info-page without having to navigate in and out of various sections.

@gumnos @chiffchaff @astrid that's actually good to know, thanks.

@oblomov

I've found that I can't tolerate using info(1) without that trick, so I tend to share it around in the hopes that others experience similar relief 😆