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.
Kind of off topic, but you know what would be cool? If you had an ‘man explain’ command that would define all the flags/args in a command, like:
man explain rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -e "ssh -p 2222" root@$dip:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera newphonepixWould give you:
rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool --append-verify --append w/old data in file checksum --progress show progress during transfer --archive, -a archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H) --verbose, -v increase verbosity --compress, -z compress file data during the transfer --rsh=COMMAND, -e specify the remote shell to useetc.
Like this?
Fish does this but is intentionally POSIX noncompliant so you’d wanr to keep the old shell installed if you run other people’s script.
Here’s what I get in fish when I start writing a
rsynccommand and hit tab to ask for completions:❱ rsync --append-verify --progress -avz - -0 --from0 (All *from/filter files are delimited by 0s) --delete (Delete files that don’t exist on sender) -4 --ipv4 (Prefer IPv4) --delete-after (Receiver deletes after transfer, not before) -6 --ipv6 (Prefer IPv6) --delete-before (Receiver deletes before transfer (default)) -8 --8-bit-output (Leave high-bit chars unescaped in output) --delete-delay (Find deletions during, delete after) [more lines omitted]You can just grep the help output
$ rsync --help 2>&1 | grep -E '^ *(--append-verify|--progress|--archive)' --archive, -a archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H) --append-verify --append w/old data in file checksum --progress show progress during transferSo it should be possible to create a simple script to do that. Similarly one can output the man document as text to stdout, which in turn can be grepped. I have no grep command at hand to do this in a useful way:
man grep | col -bThere is a Plugin for Zsh (ohmyzsh) that gives you that right in the shell. I use it all the time and rely on it. Don’t have the name on my mind though, sorry.
Please do tell once you’ve figured it out.
I always add a space or two before the flag:
/ -xI read man in nvim, there is a alias on the arch wiki IIRC (and syntax highlighting)
Bonus:
You can open man pages inside GNOME Help by usingyelp man:Xdeleted by creator
wow I kept opening
man:somethingwithoutsectionunfortunatelyin firefox instead of doing that lol
man -k printf Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword printf as regular expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent to apropos printf.the / and ? commands in the pagers
moreand mostlessimplementations should support regular expressions (usually BREs in my experience); which is the same thing grep uses. Consider reading your friendly neighborhood regex formatting manpage, if you are confused. As for easily scrolling,^Gto terminate your search followed byb(or your favorite vi or emacs scrolling bind) to scroll back should be sufficient.Also,
man some-manpage | grep expressionworks, if you didn’t know.I lately often use chatgpt for these kind of things. It’s amazing in breaking down the parameters and what they mean. Verify, especially when the problem is hard and apparently unfindable. Chatgpt won’t find it either. It sometimes makes up things in these scenarios.
edit: You guys are allowed to not like my post but it really helps me so why not try it instead of just downvoting.
I like tldr. It doesnt give incredibly in depth explanations, but it does show the basics of using most commands.
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.
https://tldr.inbrowser.app/ for anyone curious. There’s also a command line version you can install.
info
boooooo
Still waiting for someone to create Woman
I picture these pages being inviting and helpful, with maybe ascii art “awk sweet awk” or the like, rather than the current “maintenance locker full of random tools” vibe
You can search via regex. For instance you know a section heading or flag is the first thing on a line preceded with spaces. I also find it earier to read with extensions for colors.
woman in emacs.
I also find info pages much nicer to use after an adjustment period given I grew up on vim and man.
Nice operating system. Just lacks a good editor
I use nvchad and pipe the man page into it
Man pages this, man pages that. When will the Linux community start really thinking about woman pages?
Woman in emacs
What’s a womanual?
That’s the point.
I thought it would be clear that
we should start calling them womanualsthis was a joke.
