Generate and use TexInfo documentation for Git

Info is a documentation reader for reading Info files, which ususally have the extension .info. Info files are generally produced from Texinfo files, which have the extension .texi, and with the makeinfo command. See GNU’s website for more details about Texinfo.

Emacs has its own built-in Info reader (start with C-h i). So how do you install an Info documentation for Emacs?

There are several ways to view additional Info manuals in Emacs as described in Emacs FAQ. Here is what I think is the best set-up - using an addtional info directory:

First create a directory that will contain the external Info files, such as ~/.local/share/info. Then copy the .info files to be installed to this directory. A special file named dir listing the nodes to display in the Info reader needs to be created in this directory as well. If the install-info command (which is packaged with the program texinfo) is available on your system, you can add the files to dir by invoking install-info <manual>.info dir. If it's not installed you can edit dir directly. First copy the dir file under the installation directory of Emacs (such as c:/Program Files/Emacs/x86_64/share/info/dir) to the external directory. Then follow the examples already in that file to add entries for the .info files you're installing, which have the format:

* Topic: (relative-pathname).  Short description of topic.

where relative-pathname corresponds to the relative path of the file without the .info suffix. The dir file should list only entries for Info files in that directory, and all other contents could be cleared except these lines before the entries:


File: dir,  Node: Top   This is the top of the INFO tree

* Menu:

Now add the external directory to the Info-additional-directory-list to make Emacs aware of it:

(add-to-list 'Info-additional-directory-list "~/.local/share/info")

Finally kill all *info* buffers and open a new *info* buffer again (no need to restart Emacs). You should see the manuals in the top node.

References

• Info: An introduction (Info)
• GNU Texinfo Manual (Info, website)
• Building TexInfo version of Git User Manual and Git Manual Pages