CleanPrinciple5, over at the Emacs subreddit, asks an interesting question. He wonders why texinfo isn’t more popular. If you are and always have been an Emacs user, you might find that a reasonable question. On the other hand, if you ever tried to use Info without Emacs the question is apt to elicit a, “Well duh!”
Here’s my answer to CleanPrinciple5’s question: The Info utility is basically unusable. In the old days, most of the (useful) GNU documentation was available only in Info format so I was forced to use a TCL application to read it. It was still horrible but at least it was usable. All that got better when I started using Emacs; its Info interface at least makes sense.
The Unix tradition is to use man pages for a summary of how to use a program and, when necessary, a longer document—in PDF these days—to describe details not appropriate for a man page. For example, the yacc man page described the command line options and some other details but the description of how to use it to generate parsers was left to a separate paper, typically in the documents directory or the printed manual. GNU combined those two approaches into texinfo documents.
It seemed like a win and would have been except for the brain dead Info reader. Even after moving to Emacs, Info documents still leave a bad taste in my mouth and I avoid them when I can. I’m sure many other users feel the same.
Still, they’re better than simple PDF documents because they’re indexed and hyperlinked and most of them have a section with the same information traditionally contained in the Man pages. All the information you need in a single document that should be easy to read but isn’t because the readers are terrible.
Update :
Techinfo → Texinfo. Also better distinguished between Info documents and the Texinfo language.