https://codeberg.org/ggxx/nfo

* The Problem(s)

- The stand-alone info program repulses people.
- The navigation is unintuitive and the keybindings are unfamiliar (if you're not an Emacs user).
- A lot of good documentation goes unread as a result.

* A Solution

- Emacs is the best info reader.
- By using https://codeberg.org/ggxx/info-nav navigation can be completely mouse-driven, and you don't even have to know any keybindings.
- Setting up Emacs for a non-Emacs user can be a daunting task, so do it for them automagically. (The config is isolated in `~/.config/nfo/` and doesn't affect your main Emacs config if you have one.)
- Make it easy to use for non-Emacs people by providing a CLI utility, `nfo`.

This is a follow-up to the discussion in https://piza.world2ch.net/unix/kareha.pl/1767601822/ .

- I've only tested this in Linux.
- I think it should be fine on other Unixes.
- It probably won't work on Windows as it is right now, because I rely on ~ to mean your home directory.
- This is an exploration of using Emacs as an application platform.
- In this case, the built-in info reader + some modifications is the application that I'm trying to make accessible to the non-Emacs-using crowd.
- The code is a good example of how to communicate with an Emacs daemon.

Some distros package emacs without client/server support, alpine for instance. I would suggest you start a lightweight emacs -Q -nw in that case.

As a daemonization extremist, that upsets me. I didn't even know you could remove client/server support from emacs.

I made it on to MELPA for the first time.
https://melpa.org/#/info-nav
https://codeberg.org/ggxx/info-nav

This is the Elisp library that nfo uses to make info manuals easier to read.
https://piza.world2ch.net/unix/kareha.pl/1767996961/
https://codeberg.org/ggxx/nfo

If you're already an Emacs user, you should use info-nav directly. nfo was made for Unix Philosophers who aren't particularly fond of Emacs but might still want to read info manuals without going crazy. (I should make that more clear in the various READMEs.)

For the curious, getting in to MELPA is done by forking melpa/melpa on github and adding a small elisp recipe file that tells MELPA how to fetch the package.

;; recipes/info-nav
(info-nav :fetcher codeberg :repo "ggxx/info-nav")

Then you send a pull request.
https://github.com/melpa/melpa/pull/9778

After review and fixing, the pull request gets merged and your package is published. You also get your repo mirrored (in case the original disappears?).
https://github.com/emacsmirror/info-nav