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In most cases packages installed with Guix come with documentation. There
are two main documentation formats: “Info”, a browsable hypertext format
used for GNU software, and “manual pages” (or “man pages”), the linear
documentation format traditionally found on Unix. Info manuals are accessed
with the info
command or with Emacs, and man pages are accessed
using man
.
You can look for documentation of software installed on your system by keyword. For example, the following command searches for information about “TLS” in Info manuals:
$ info -k TLS "(emacs)Network Security" -- STARTTLS "(emacs)Network Security" -- TLS "(gnutls)Core TLS API" -- gnutls_certificate_set_verify_flags "(gnutls)Core TLS API" -- gnutls_certificate_set_verify_function …
The command below searches for the same keyword in man pages34:
$ man -k TLS SSL (7) - OpenSSL SSL/TLS library certtool (1) - GnuTLS certificate tool …
These searches are purely local to your computer so you have the guarantee that documentation you find corresponds to what you have actually installed, you can access it off-line, and your privacy is respected.
Once you have these results, you can view the relevant documentation by running, say:
$ info "(gnutls)Core TLS API"
or:
$ man certtool
Info manuals contain sections and indices as well as hyperlinks like those
found in Web pages. The info
reader (see Info reader in Stand-alone GNU Info) and its Emacs counterpart (see Misc
Help in The GNU Emacs Manual) provide intuitive key bindings to
navigate manuals. See Getting Started in Info: An Introduction,
for an introduction to Info navigation.
The
database searched by man -k
is only created in profiles that
contain the man-db
package.
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