source format vs info/html
source format vs info/html
Posted Dec 17, 2014 11:36 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)In reply to: source format vs info/html by robbe
Parent article: Emacs and changing documentation formats
There are still a few interfaces that work by pages - two that come to mind are PDF viewers (where you are viewing a document with hard page boundaries) and ebook readers (often with slowly-updating displays that would blur on scrolling, and attempting to reproduce the experience of reading a book). But on the whole, scrolling interfaces have driven out paginated ones, and with good reason.
I would much prefer the Info reader to show the whole document and scroll through it, a line at a time with up / down and a screenful (not a 'section') at a time with page up / page down. That doesn't stop it from accepting Space to jump to the start of the next section, but you could still visually see your position in the document.
Yes, I have sometimes used the trick of info | less to get a more usable interface...
Posted Dec 17, 2014 12:04 UTC (Wed)
by mchapman (subscriber, #66589)
[Link]
Posted Dec 17, 2014 12:26 UTC (Wed)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link]
> Yes you can page through it with space - which causes the current page to vanish and be replaced by the next page.source format vs info/html
I find the single biggest usability improvement to GNU Info is to turn this behaviour off. If the documentation is going to be split up into separate chapters (which I don't find particularly annoying, to be honest), then it's better to not have the viewer jump between chapters and completely refresh the screen when you're not expecting it to.
To change this behaviour you need to set up an ~/.infokey file containing:
#var
scroll-behaviour=Page Only
Then run infokey to compile that to ~/.info. Who said GNU Info wasn't user-friendly? :-)
source format vs info/html