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Is there a better way to browse man pages? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[-] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 44 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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 newphonepix

Would 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 use

etc.

[-] TeddyKila@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

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.

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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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