this image comes to mind every time i use man pages

    • /home/pineapplelover
      9•8 months ago

      Is it just me or is man and --help kind of confusing to understand? Idk, I just have difficulty learning the commands that way.

      • Ann Archy
        4•8 months ago

        Ha ha ha, no you are most certainly not alone, that’s gotta be one of the most common gripes with new users. Those things were written in the 70s and have remained unchanged since. It’s a standardization thing. :)

      • Eager EagleEnglish
        4•8 months ago

        I find --help to be often useful, but man is hard to sell. As a tool to know more details of an option or to know everything that’s available, it’s great. As a first contact with the CLI tool or a quick lookup, man past the first paragraph is often a waste of time. For most lookups cheat.sh is much quicker.

        Though I’ve recently been using clipea with GPT-4, and it’s by far the best experience. Fastest way to have straightforward one-liners that do pretty much what you asked for.

      • Ook the Librarian
        1•8 months ago

        man is self-paging and searchable. It uses some old-school emacs bindings like Ctrl + V from before PgDn was a standard key. So I’m not claiming it’s intuitive.

        If cmd --help spews a bunch of info to the screen, you basically have to handle it with grep or less or go modern.

  • @[email protected]
    33•8 months ago

    And then the manpage goes:

    ThE fUlL dOcUmEnTaTiOn CaN bE vIeWeD wItH “info blah invocation”

    Stop trying to make info a thing. It’s not going to be a thing.

    • @[email protected]
      16•8 months ago

      I used a tool yesterday whose manpage told me to look into --help for full list of commands. The audacity!

      • @[email protected]
        9•8 months ago

        They could’ve just copy-pasted it! And --help should be a brief, easy-to-understand list of commands and explanations, not an extension

          • @[email protected]
            2•8 months ago

            Yeah. I recommend the TLDR terminal tool. You can contribute command TLDRs. If there is a one for said command, you can type tldr comad and it will give you some valid uses and example commands.

            • Ann Archy
              2•8 months ago

              I knew about tldr, I’m old Linuxoid now, but didn’t know you could contribute. I’ll give it another go. By this point though… I’ve already been through the hellfire.

    • @[email protected]
      6•8 months ago

      Especially when you don’t have a US keyboard. How the fuck am I supposed to navigate through the info document when the key combination to follow links is Ctrl+] and ] itself is hidden behind some modifier combo?

  • @[email protected]English
    14•8 months ago

    Man is too much for me. I can’t handle that many words at once, which is why I like using tldr

    • @[email protected]
      2•8 months ago

      Using u and d instead of page up and down made it much more readable for me, then you don’t have a whole page with every button press

  • Hjalmar
    9•8 months ago

    I first read this like “look, here is a image of a man” (-:

    • lionkoy5555
      3•8 months ago

      this will be helpful, but looks like github repo is no longer being maintained

  • @[email protected]English
    6•8 months ago

    I’ve never used it. Just typing /h -h --help and if that doesn’t work then I’m Googling it.

    • @[email protected]
      1•8 months ago

      I legitimately don’t understand why people still insist on recommending it. Like it had its place, and it was awesome for what it was, but there are many better ways of displaying that info and better ways of searching for it. If it’s the only option, fine. Otherwise, I’m not parsing through that shit in a terminal.

      • Ook the Librarian
        1•8 months ago

        I disagree that there are much better ways. When I have a question while I’m working in the terminal, it’s nice to have a searchable manual that’s in the terminal.

        But I can certainly understand why modern manpages aren’t well-developed. That info is already somewhere else. And it’s good enough. It’s not like I’m paying people to write manpages.

    • Ook the Librarian
      1•8 months ago

      “help is an invalid command. Use --help for help.”

      I always feel like an idiot when a read an error message like that.