Products · Product
GNU Info
Raised as a usability problem by 24 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2012–2024), in 19 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 29 complaints
- Hardwrapped monospace text, unique page-title naming, and poor image support make it annoying to read2024-10-05
- Emacs-style navigation is jarring for vim users and hard to use2023-12-22
- Hierarchy categories are unpredictable, so users cannot tell where a page lives and cannot navigate2023-12-22
- Info's hypertext interface is confusing to use, so piping it to less is recommended2023-10-16
- Commenter can never remember how to use or navigate the info viewer2023-05-25
- Info pages are confusing and complicated to navigate compared to man2023-05-24
- Man pages direct to info commands that have no texinfo documentation2021-12-01
- "info cp" did not open the command reference, making it hard to find what was needed2021-11-30
- Navigation of the info viewer is opaque and nonintuitive to the user2021-04-26
- Commenter finds texinfo/info navigation completely unusable, prefers printed PDF2018-10-09
- Info message pointing to man pages is smug and confusing, frustrating the user2016-11-24
- Default info viewer is unusable for people who aren't Emacs users2016-10-30
- Info's navigation UI is so undiscoverable it is hostile to task-focused users2016-08-17
- Navigation commands use obscure Emacs conventions that users can't discover easily2016-08-16
- Info not set up by default, so users can't remember how to reach the needed page2016-08-16
- Commenter is always confused about how to use it2016-08-16
- Navigation commands follow obscure Emacs conventions that non-Emacs users cannot be expected to know2016-08-16
- Info pages browse like a web page, making quick reference during incidents frustrating2016-06-18
- Info documentation reader is hard to use; commenter initially disliked it2016-03-05
- Info pages are hard to search and navigate because the reader uses awkward Emacs-style keybindings2016-03-04
- Must read info intro before reaching wanted docs; split into fragments2015-04-05
- Man page See Also section replaced with pointer to info manual, losing useful related-command list2015-04-05
- Info documentation is worse than man pages for quick reference2014-02-07
- Navigating GNU Info pages is awful and unintuitive2014-02-06
- Man pages redirect to info, which the user can never remember how to use2014-01-16
- Man page for awk points to Info instead, which the commenter found a pain for years2013-11-01
- Standalone Info reader is non-intuitive and hard to navigate, even for Emacs users2013-11-01
- Man pages are confusing masses of trivia that are hard to use2012-10-12
- Hard to tell where one page ends and the next begins; requires memorizing keyboard shortcuts2012-03-05