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Is there a better way to browse man pages?

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.

Schmerzbold , (edited )

You can set on what line on the screen less (the pager program man uses by default) puts search results with the -jn/–jump-target=n option. For example, using .5 as a value for n makes less focus the line with the search result on the center of the screen. This should help with your overshoot issue.

Either set the option within less with the - command followed by j.5↵ for the current running instance of less, or set and export the LESS environment variable inside your ~/.bashrc to have less always behave that way.

wuphysics87 ,

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.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

JRepin ,
@JRepin@lemmy.ml avatar

Yup still exists. It is also available in KDE Help Center. And you can quickly jump to a man page you typing “” into KRunner.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I am searching with /x

On most systems these days you can use regular expressions there. If /-x isn't good enough try /-x[ ,] or whatever.

OneCardboardBox ,

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.

thingsiplay , (edited )

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 pager or with the environmental variable $MANPAGER or $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:


<span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">export </span><span style="color:#323232;">MANPAGER</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">=</span><span style="color:#183691;">'nvim +Man!'
</span>

I kind of missed it and will set it to this now. Put this line in the Bash configuration .bashrc and every man document is loaded in Neovim now.

amanneedsamaid ,

+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

PseudoSpock ,
@PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar 

<span style="color:#323232;">       man -k printf
</span><span style="color:#323232;">           Search  the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword
</span><span style="color:#323232;">           printf as regular expression.  Print out any matches.  Equivalent to
</span><span style="color:#323232;">           apropos printf.
</span>
electricprism ,

I read man in nvim, there is a alias on the arch wiki IIRC (and syntax highlighting)

ExtimateCookie ,

Still waiting for someone to create Woman

pr06lefs ,

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

hagar ,

It’s a thing!

RovingFox ,
@RovingFox@infosec.pub avatar

I use nvchad and pipe the man page into it

Rozauhtuno ,
@Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It’s not exactly what you asked for, but the fish shell has often explanations of what each flag does.

nore ,

I’ve had this same situation happen to me before and my solution was to search -x instead of just x.

traches ,

I’d also like some guidance on this problem (other than “use emacs”), but searching for “ -x” will have a lower false positive rate

sping ,

Sorry it’s not a very direct answer but this is one of the many things that make Emacs such a comfortable environment once you’re used to it, which takes … a while.

There is a man command and then of course it’s just more text displayed so you can search and narrow and highlight etc. in the same way you do with any other text. Plus of course there are a few trivial bonuses like links to other man pages being clickable.

It’s all text and Emacs is a text manipulation framework (that naturally includes some editors).

thingsiplay ,

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 -h or –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 -x or –ignore in 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 pressing h while looking at a document.

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