Info Pages

 

As with the man pages, the place to start is to run info on info:

 info info

While the man pages are just displayed with some kind of paging program (like pg, more or less), the info system is based around a read-only version of emacs. Emacs is a terribly competent and complicated editor: there are things there to read your email, to browse the web, to speak pages to you (if you are visually impaired), to calculate phases of the moon, .... You name it, emacs can probably do it.

If you are NOT someone who is used to emacs, the things to remember are:

• Use the up and down arrow keys to move the cursor up and down.
• If a topic (indicated by an asterisk in the leading column) looks interesting, put the cursor on that row (beginning of line) and press the enter key.
• If you want to go to the previous level of the information tree, press the letter ``p''.
• If you want to quit, press the letter ``q''.

There are LOTS of other things info can do, but that should be enough to get you started.

Entering info all by itself offers you a menu of most of the topics available, but I don't think this is guaranteed.