For many, many years now when I want to browse a man page about something I'll type man X into my terminal, substituting X for whatever it is I wish to learn about. Depending on the manual, it's short and therefore easy to find what I want, or I am deep in the woods because I'm trying to find a specific flag that appears many times in a very long document. Woe is me if the flag switch is a bare letter, like x.

And let's say it is x. Now I am searching with /x followed by n n n n n n n n N n n n n n. Obviously I'm not finding the information I want, the search is literal (not fuzzy, nor "whole word"), and even if I find something the manual pager might overshoot me because finding text will move the found line to the top of the terminal, and maybe the information I really want comes one or two lines above.

So... there HAS to be a better way, right? There has to be a modern, fast, easily greppable version to go through a man page. Does it exist?

P.S. I am not talking about summaries like tldr because I typically don't need summaries but actual technical descriptions.

  • jeffreyosborne@lemm.ee
    ·
    6 months ago

    I like tldr. It doesnt give incredibly in depth explanations, but it does show the basics of using most commands.

    • underisk [none/use name]
      ·
      6 months ago

      https://tldr.inbrowser.app/ for anyone curious. There’s also a command line version you can install.

    • rotopenguin@infosec.pub
      ·
      6 months ago

      I have to remember to use tldr, one of these days. Some manpages get so lost in the pedantry of covering everything that the 99 percentile stuff is buried.