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.
Bonus:
You can open man pages inside GNOME Help by usingyelp man:Xwow I kept opening
man:somethingwithoutsectionunfortunatelyin firefox instead of doing that lolFor KDE users, this also works with
khelpcenter.
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.I use nvchad and pipe the man page into it
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.As an emacs user, I use
M-x man. All my standard keybindings make finding what I need very easy.Of course, it’s not so fast if you aren’t already in emacs.
I want to mention that one can set the pager for man to be Vim too. Then it would load the document in Vim instead in less for display and navigation. This can be set with option
man -P pageror with the environmental variable$MANPAGERor$PAGER. I had set this up in the past with original Vim, but it required some special options for Vim as well. It was nice, but ultimately not needed; so I went back to less. Sometimes less is more.Edit: Here is how one can use Neovim as the pager:
export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'I kind of missed it and will set it to this now. Put this line in the Bash configuration .bashrc and every
mandocument is loaded in Neovim now.+1, displaying in a Emacs buffer solves any issues I could have. If you’re already ‘in’ Emacs, this will be more frictionless than shell scripts around
man
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
I haven’t used
lspfor a while, but it seemed like a good$PAGER.Sorry for my previous comment. I was commenting before reading the entire post and was missing the point. On a sidenote, its often enough and helpful to just list the options with
program -hor--help. Sometimes the help option has more information or is easier to understand than the man document.When I search for options in a man document, I usually try it with putting a dash in front of it as
-xor--ignorein example. For really large documents sometimes it can help to add a space before it "-x" or a comma after it "-x," depending on how its actually written. BTW the man program itself has a builtin help you can show by just pressinghwhile looking at a document.I am searching with /x
On most systems these days you can use regular expressions there. If
/-xisn’t good enough try/-x[ ,]or whatever.It’s not exactly what you asked for, but the
fishshell has often explanations of what each flag does.Man pages this, man pages that. When will the Linux community start really thinking about woman pages?
What’s a womanual?
That’s the point.
I thought it would be clear that
we should start calling them womanualsthis was a joke.
Woman in emacs
In KDE, there used to be man: as a protocol that you could use from Konqueror or anything else for that matter. Does it still exist?
I’m at work and cannot check.
Yup still exists. It is also available in KDE Help Center. And you can quickly jump to a man page you typing “#man” into KRunner.
I’d also like some guidance on this problem (other than “use emacs”), but searching for “ -x” will have a lower false positive rate
I like tldr. It doesnt give incredibly in depth explanations, but it does show the basics of using most commands.
https://tldr.inbrowser.app/ for anyone curious. There’s also a command line version you can install.
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.
@[email protected] maybe something like Tkman at https://sourceforge.net/projects/tkman/? Or web based like https://linux.die.net/man/ or https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/index.html.
