Jim Osborn writes:

Well, perhaps you can "de-crypt" a few things I've been unable to figure out with the info system:

There is the stand-alone `info' browser, which I do not use much, since Emacs is my usual editing framework, and I use the Info reader in it. So, what I may say is true for Emacs, but I'm not sure for the stand-alone `info'.

1: How do I scroll a single line forward or back? Often the text I'm reading is split inconveniently off the top or bottom of the screen, and I want to bring the entire paragraph onscreen so I can study it. What's the info equivalent of less' <ret> to scroll one line down, or 1b to go one line backward?

What I usually do is that I bring the cursor roughly in the middle of the area of interest, and do `C-l' (that is, `Control' with `L') to bring that position near the centre of the screen. In some rare circumstances, I use the usual Emacs commands `M-0 C-l' (or `Alt' with `0' and `Control' with `L') to bring the current line at the top of the window, or `M-- C-l' (or `Alt' with `-' and `Control with `L') to bring the current line at the bottom. Sometimes, more rarely, I use the window scroll bar, with the mouse. I'm not really a mouse-type guy, but within Emacs, using the scroll bar and various buttons, you have a quite fine control over the amount of the screen scrolled at each click.

2: How do I scroll directly to the end of the current page?

'M->' (or `Alt'-`Shift'-`>') jump at the end. `M-<' at the beginning.

3: How can I scroll unidirectionally (keeping in mind question 1) through the entire document?

By using `SPC' repeatedly (in `Emacs', this skips over menus, probably because you are not using them). Using `BKS' repeatedly scrolls back through the whole document. Two useful commands, besides `m' which selects a menu entry with completion in the current page, or `f' to follow a reference with completion in the current page, are `i' to jump somewhere in the manual given an index entry, or more prosaically, `s' to search the whole manual for a regular expression. Of course, it is not at all required to know these commands for using Info, but they might speed up things, when you know rather exactly what you want.

The reason I consider less "simpler" than info is less' abstraction of the document as a single monolithic file.

Using `SPC', `BKS' for raw movement, and `s' to search wholly, gives me that abstraction enough to be comfortable whenever I need it. When a manual is well structured, or well indexed, it is usually easier to go through the various menus (with `m') or the index (with `i'). In the case of the `tar' manual, I also tried to have a manual section for each option, with the node name being the option name, and giving everything that should be said about that option. I would use the `g' command to go to a particular node, with completion, the other means also being available. I surely put many cross-node references to ease quick movement (with `f' to follow references). As you say, one could use the `tar' manual as a monolithic bulk, but I would think this is a rather heavy and slow paradigm, at least given the manual size. There is a _lot_ to say about many things.

I'm not convinced I've ever been able to see the entire info document for tar, for example, as I don't know if I've poked into all its corners and cul de sacs.

I quite understand what you mean. Doing it that way, you even need some confidence in the author that his/her structure really reaches every corner. Moreover, this is a rather tedious way to read a manual from one cover to the other. Better is just using `t' to go to the `top' of the document, and paging all your way through with `SPC'. And if curiosity brings you to wander, follow references, menu items, or whatever, remember that you can pop up the chain of nodes visited using `l' (for `last' node), until you came back to your main stream, and merely resume your sequential reading from there.

Thanks for the thoughts,

Thanks as well. There is nothing like frank speech to clarify things! :-) Keep happy! -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/