GNU Info Manuals

Texinfo

GNU Texinfo is a documentation system used for producing either digital or printed manuals. Among other things, it provides the info command.

Read more at about Texinfo at:

The ‘info’ command

First:

$ info info
$ man info
$ info --help
Installing Info packages on your distribution

On Arch Linux, the texinfo package is generally installed as a dependency of base-devel (since almost all Arch users install base-devel as it is required for a lot of things), or as a dependency of some other package. But if for some reason it is not installed:

$ sudo pacman --sync --refresh --needed texinfo

On Debian-based distros, you may need this:

$ sudo apt install texinfo-doc-nonfree

On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install texinfo

Generally, info pages are more user-friendly and tutorial-like than man pages. To read info pages, do:

$ info <program or command>
$ info ed
$ info sed
$ info bash
$ info find
$ info xargs

Not all programs and commands provide an info manual. In the past, info <program-that-does-not-have-info-manual would display the man page for that program instead. Some examples include vi, vim, and rsync.

I noticed in 2026 that trying info vi brings the info on some program that matches part of the name, while others that have no match, still show the man page instead. For example, info vi shows the info manual for Viper (an Emacs package), while for vim and rsync (which have no partial match on the name of program), it still displays their man pages instead.

You can also open info directly into a section of an info document (if you know the name of the section), something like:

$ info sed 'execution cycle'

Programs in the coreutils group have an invocation section:

$ info coreutils

$ info '(coreutils) echo invocation'
$ info coreutils 'echo invocation'

$ info '(coreutils) printf invocation'
$ info coreutils 'printf invocation'

$ info '(coreutils) kill invocation'
$ info coreutils 'kill invocation'

From GNU Emacs, you can read the info pages with:

C-h i m PROGRAM_NAME

Some examples:

C-h i m info
C-h i m ed
C-h i m sed
C-h i m find

Info has a lot of nomenclature, concepts and commands. info info explains about commands to find stuff inside info manuals, navigate documents, etc. It is a somewhat complex system. Yet, a powerful and very useful one.

info summary

$ info emacs --node Files
$ info '(emacs)Files'

$ info /usr/local/share/info/bash.info
$ info ~/docs/doc.info

$ info sed 'sed scripts' 'the "s" command'
$ info emacs 'user input'

Run info info 'moving the cursor'.

META (or ALT) can also be achieved by hitting ESC, e.g. ESC-f for forward-word. And ESC itself can be produced with C-[. DEL is Backspace.