The Info Index

Being an old time Unix head, I had a hard time warming up to the GNU Info system. I preferred the man pages when they were available and found the info utility hard to use. That’s probably because I was using Vi at the time and the key bindings were unfamiliar. The ironical twist that you had to read the Info manual to learn how to use info didn’t help.

That changed when I started using Emacs and Info became a natural and extraordinarily useful feature. Now I get annoyed when some tool I’m using doesn’t have an Info node. At this point, I’ve been using it for almost a decade and half and am pretty familiar with its ins and outs but Marcin Borkowski (mbork) taught me something new.

It turns out that if you use I instead of i to access the index, Emacs will build a virtual node that that has an entry for every term in the index that matches what you’re searching for. You can see this in action by bringing up the Elisp node and then searching (with I) for car.

That’s pretty useful and mbork has a bit more so be sure to take a look at his post.

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