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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.

Obi ,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

As someone with 0 knowledge of Linux (and very little of programming/command lines in general), this thread reads funny AF.

martinb ,

We are deep in the technical weeds here. 95% of Linux usage really doesn’t require such humour unfortunately.

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.

wargreymon ,

info

rotopenguin ,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

boooooo

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.

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.

Andy ,
@Andy@programming.dev avatar

As someone else said, setting less’ jump value is helpful.

Another tool I use, mostly for the zshall manpage, is github.com/kristopolous/mansnip

MrSoup ,

Bonus:
You can open man pages inside GNOME Help by using yelp man:X

jbk ,

wow I kept opening man:somethingwithoutsectionunfortunately in firefox instead of doing that lol

e8d79 , (edited )

For KDE users, this also works with khelpcenter.

princessnorah ,
@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Thank you, that’s awesome.

ParetoOptimalDev ,

woman in emacs.

I also find info pages much nicer to use after an adjustment period given I grew up on vim and man.

crispy_kilt ,

Nice operating system. Just lacks a good editor

GadgeteerZA ,
@GadgeteerZA@fedia.io avatar

@GnuLinuxDude 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.

jazztickets ,

I always add a space or two before the flag: / -x

Tovervlag , (edited )

I lately often use chatgpt for these kind of things. It’s amazing in breaking down the parameters and what they mean. Verify, especially when the problem is hard and apparently unfindable. Chatgpt won’t find it either. It sometimes makes up things in these scenarios.

edit: You guys are allowed to not like my post but it really helps me so why not try it instead of just downvoting.

Asetru ,

It’s amazing

It sometimes makes up things

xkcd.com/481/

Zucca ,

I haven’t used lsp for a while, but it seemed like a good $PAGER.

github.com/dgouders/lsp

bastion ,

Man pages this, man pages that. When will the Linux community start really thinking about woman pages?

Eyck_of_denesle ,

Woman in emacs

crispy_kilt ,

What’s a womanual?

bastion ,

That’s the point.

I thought it would be clear that we should start calling them womanuals this was a joke.

ssm , (edited )
@ssm@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

the / and ? commands in the pagers more and most less implementations 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, ^G to terminate your search followed by b (or your favorite vi or emacs scrolling bind) to scroll back should be sufficient.

Also, man some-manpage | grep expression works, if you didn’t know.

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