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.
I have krunner with the man plugin enabled. When typing man:X in the krunner prompt, a window opens with a nicely styled man page.
Even quicker is "#X"
I did not know that. Thank you.