[sigh] If you don't know emacs, info becomes more arcane that it needs to be.

One advantage to info lies in the jump-to-keyword and drill-down-from-keyword features. Some of this is less (sic) valuable since we now have the 'less' pager with built-in search. The way that info works is more like what we do with a wiki today. I would like the docs as wiki files, and some way to augment with my own comments and notes and such. I would likely use 'lynx' or similar as the wiki reader.

I'm running Ubuntu Jaunty (v9.04) and I don't find a "complete set" of info files. In many cases, the info page and the man page have identical and limited content.

~~~ 0;-Dan

I agree, because I tried GNU Emacs and it just made my hands and brain hurt, and why does it need to be a whole "OS" when the one it's running on is great? Just another useless layer of abstraction.

(grin) Remember, emacs hails from days without any sort of user GUI. Today, we can easily open multiple instances of an editor and spread things out on our desktop. Then, each process was expensive so the editor provided multiple windows, a shell, and all sorts of toys. As a developer, one could launch emacs and never leave it all day.

When X11 happened, emacs get "enhanced" to become Xemacs that took advantage of the new environment. (Please don't flame over my choice of "enhanced" vs. "forked" vs. something else.) The original emacs crowd made their own changes to that plain-emacs would notice if X11 was available. Anyway, here we are...

Cheers,
~~~ 0;-Dan

If you have to work in text mode and really can't stand starting and exiting your editor often, why not use something like GNU Screen?