Unix manual pages have two great advantages: you can quickly look up the page for a given command or function, and all the important information is presented on one page which you can read through sequentially, or page up and down with less(1). GNU info does at least let you jump straight to most sections by giving their name on the command line, but it's highly awkward to read them bit-by-bit with that Info reader or with Emacs. Hypertext is greatly overrated compared to straightforward prose.
However, info(1) does have one handy feature: if stdout is not a
tty, it will dump the entire Info section, in order, to stdout.
This means you can run:
info bash | less
and get a reasonable approximation to a manual page, which you
can then search for the string you're looking for.
One annoyance is the chat produced by Info while it does this.
These two patches add a -q
flag so you can turn it off.
So now we have a way to quickly look up all details of a
command, just as with man pages? Well, not quite. On my
system, info make brings up a page about MakeMPX.
Grr...
Update: pinfo is an Info and manpage reader with keybindings similar to Lynx. I dislike the Lynx keybindings, so this isn't ideal, but at least it means there is one fewer sucky text-mode 'browser' interface to learn.