I am writing this thread in the hope that newer users of linux can make use of this 'trick' to make needed information more accessible and also more usable.
I have found that using man pages in the terminal to be cumbersome. That has kept me (until now) from accessing this information that is honestly the best info for linux commands used in the terminal. Then I had a thought "can I make a document of a man page that I could then look at and use in a text editor?"
The answer is YES, and it is not hard to do.
When the man command is entered it is followed by the linux command that we want to research, such as;
we then see the man page for that command, ls in this case. For me however I find working in the terminal with man docs in terminal to be not as easy as I would like - for one thing, it would be nice to have that doc available in another place than the terminal so that I could refer 'back and forth' between the man doc and actually working with the command in the terminal. Also, scrolling in a text editor is much easier than in a terminal.(there may be other opinions about that, I am just speaking personally here.)
So to make a man doc available to a text editor, we just have to pipe the output to a filename where the output is then sent and saved. Using our ls example,
.
Based on being in our home directory, manls is now a text file in our home directory that can be opened with our text editor of choice and made available when we are working with that particular command.
I have made these text files that for me are commonly used commands in the terminal
.
It is also possible to do the same sort of thing with info files.
these pages are like man pages, but with additional explanation.
Just use this command still using ls as an example;
Now we have an info page for the ls command that is named infols that is available to our text editor of choice, and again can be accessed at the same time that the command is being used in a terminal.
I love the results of this work and hope others can use this trick to improve 'info access' efforts.