@technomancy oh yeah! i imagine writing it is a different story (i mostly meant from a consumption standpoint!)

with it, i have basically have a library of ebooks that are accessible from a terminal, emacs, or a browser, all fully searchable, offline, and even integratable with other documentation in-editor

all while still having a small enough footprint that i don't need to worry about interacting with it on a pubnix or lo-fi systems

@technomancy i might be a bit biased though, since they were a lifesaver that basically taught me how to do so much stuff before i had reliable internet, and i still like being able to fall back to it when on trips to places where that's still the case, but still wanna do one of my hobbies during downtime~

@thingywott ah, yeah, texinfo is an authoring language and system, it sounds like you're talking about the info file output instead

I read HTML documentation from within Emacs all the time using M-x eww so what you're describing doesn't really feel unique to info files at all

but your original question was why people are sour on info files, and I think that's clearer: it's because GNU people often intentionally write bad man pages that don't include any relevant information; they just tell you to use info instead

with behavior like that it's no wonder people don't like it

@technomancy oops, yep! that's what i meant

and ahhh dang, that's not particularly great behavior, huh? :<

i use eww too, though i try to avoid it on pubnix because html parsing kinda balloons my memory usage, and emacs' gc is pretty bad at reclaiming that, meaning i need to occasionally restart the emacs server completely if i do that

i also find it also doesn't integrate as nicely like the modes that just pop up common lisp hyperspec info nodes when i need em do

@thingywott hm; yeah, it sounds like it's not really anything inherent in the format, but the authors of various Emacs modes just happened to put more effort into integrating info files over HTML, probably because eww just hasn't been around for as long as info? prior to eww you had to use w3m which not everyone had installed

most of the lisping I do tends to rely on docstrings more than long-form reference materials anyway

@technomancy there's probably some truth to that!

the amount of built-in documentation for so many things that have actual tutorials and examples without needing to install anything is really nice

but it would also be nice if it were html and was integrated a little nicer and consistently too

i guess i was more just wondering why the books themselves had such a bad reputation--i guess it's more the requirement to read them because of the lack of a good quick reference?