Charles Choi, as we know, likes to have things the way he likes to have them. Being an Emacs user, it’s easy for him to scratch many of those itches. In his latest post, he complains about the inconsistent navigation methods for various Emacs documentation commands. They all seem to behave differently and most of them don’t follow the standard Emacs navigation conventions.
He considers, Info, Help, Man, and Shortdoc. The worst, by far, is Info. The only thing I can think of that has a worse UI is the standalone Info utility, which I consider unusable. I never use Shortdoc so I won’t have much to say about it but Help and Man seem to me to be okay, if a little inconsistent.
Choi has his own ideas of what those interfaces should be and wrote some code to implement them. It’s easy to understand and adapt the code to your own preferences. My preference is that all these Emacs functions should follow the standard Emacs navigation conventions. Since these buffers are all read-only, I’d like n and p to behave like Ctrl+n and Ctrl+p.
Some of the documentation—Info in particular—have a complicated structure the needs additional commands to navigate them. For those, I don’t particularly care what they use as long as they’re at least semi-consistent among the different documentation types.
Choi’s ideas are different from mine so take a look and see what you think. One particularly nice idea is his paragraph movement commands. He uses highlight mode to mark the first line of the current paragraph. It’s a small thing but helps you keep your place.
As usual, Choi’s post is interesting and thought provoking. Take a look just to get some ideas as to what, if anything, you’d like to do about these commands.