Hello GNU,
To give some context to my question, I want to have an info reader in Vim
(Neovim actually, but it should work in both), similar to Emacs’s info-mode. I
have looked at how Emacs does it and from the looks of it, it re-implements the
entire standalone reader in Emacs Lisp. That’s certainly a way to do it, but
it’s a lot of duplicate work when the standalone info reader already knows
everything about info files. Here is my plugin repository so far:
https://gitlab.com/HiPhish/info.vim
So I was planning on leveraging the standalone info as a sort of file
processor: you send it parameters of what you want and you receive the
formatted output back. Let’s say I want to read the introduction to Bash:
> info bash introduction --output - 2>/dev/null
This works fine, I can read that into a buffer. I can also specify an entire
path:
> info bash introduction 'what is bash?' --output - 2>/dev/null
That’s half of the reader already. However, the other half is finding my way
around the file. References and menus are fairly simple to parse, but how do I
get what they point to? This is where the standalone info fails, I cannot do
something like this:
> info bash --x-ref 'foo bar'
and get back the name of the node plus line number. Similarly, if I want to
search the index for something I would like to pass this to the shell:
> info bash --index 'foo bar'
and get back a grep-like listing of where this occurs in the file. In my Vim
plugin I am using a URI for specifying locations in the info file (see the
HACKING in my repo for details):
info://file-name/node-1/node-2/
I don’t expect info to return a URI like that back to me (although that would
be pretty cool), but I should have enough information to assemble it. A line
number can be given as a fragment or query within the URI. And of course if
someone has suggestions for a better URI I’m all ear.
So I guess the bottom line of my question is, can standalone info be used in
such a way that I can call it to get information for navigation back from it?
And if not, can we extend it? I am a C programmer, but I don’t know my way
around Texinfo, that’s why I’m asking first.
