The info
command displays documentation available in Info format. This is a document format that supports basic text formatting (less than modern man
), documents consisting of multiple logical pages, and hyperlinks.
Info files are usually generated from texinfo sources, which can be transformed both into Info documentation that's readable in a text terminal, nicer printable text in a format such as PDF, or HTML. The Info format is older than HTML.
The Info format started out as Emacs's documentation format. There's a more fancy Info browser built into Emacs, and info
is available for non-Emacs users. The standalone info
browser is fairly minimalistic and doesn't have configurable key bindings, and since it comes from GNU it naturally has Emacs-like key bindings. If you want an Info browser with vi-like key bindings, use Emacs and one of its vi emulation packages.
The full documentation of info
is part of the texinfo package. Your distribution may package the documentation separately from the executable due to license concerns over GNU documentation; for example, Debian ships it in texinfo-doc-nonfree
.
If you run info foo
and there's no foo
available in the Info documentation, the info
utility tries calling man foo
, and if that succeeds, info
displays the man page rendered by man
in info
's interface.
info man
andman info
?info info
andman man
only the later produces a result.man info
is the same "documentation" thatman
has.info
has a--vi-keys
option for (a subset of) vim keybindings.