unix help routines

[Ted Lemon]

?6c
>    I am interested in help routines for the unix system.  The manual is
>    ok but is very difficult if you don't know already what you are looking
>    for.  What I am interested in is a menu driven help routine similar
>    to VMS help.  Upon invocation, this routine would spit out a list of
>    topics and would prompt the user for a topic then a subtopic, etc.
>    Has anyone done anything like this?  Is anyone currently working
>    on something like this?  Are there any more redundant questions I can
>    ask?
?6c
Something like what you are looking for is already available.   RMS
has put together something called TexInfo, which combines Knuth's TeX
with the original DECsystem-20 (10?) Info program.   The idea is that
you can create one document which looks like a manual when you format
it for printing, and yet can be formatted so that it can be traversed
in a tree-like fashion, like VMS help only better.   TexInfo comes
with GNU Emacs, which is available on 1600 BPI tape from the Free
Software Foundation for a nominal charge ($150, I think), or from your
friends for free.

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Ted Lemon
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