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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.

pr06lefs ,

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:


<span style="color:#323232;">rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      --append-verify          --append w/old data in file checksum
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      --progress               show progress during transfer
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      --archive, -a            archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      --verbose, -v            increase verbosity
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      --compress, -z           compress file data during the transfer
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      --rsh=COMMAND, -e        specify the remote shell to use 
</span>

etc.

agentsac ,

Like this?

matrixrunner ,
@matrixrunner@lemmy.world avatar

Or these?

thingsiplay ,

You can just grep the help output


<span style="color:#323232;">$ rsync --help </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">2</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">>&</span><span style="color:#323232;">amp</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">;</span><span style="color:#323232;">1 </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">| </span><span style="color:#323232;">grep -E </span><span style="color:#183691;">'^ *(--append-verify|--progress|--archive)'
</span><span style="color:#323232;">--archive, -a            archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">--append-verify          --append w/old data in file checksum
</span><span style="color:#323232;">--progress               show progress during transfer
</span>

So it should be possible to create a simple script to do that. Similarly one can output the man document as text to stdout, which in turn can be grepped. I have no grep command at hand to do this in a useful way:


<span style="color:#323232;">man grep </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">| </span><span style="color:#323232;">col -b
</span>
Majestix ,

There is a Plugin for Zsh (ohmyzsh) that gives you that right in the shell. I use it all the time and rely on it. Don’t have the name on my mind though, sorry.

bitfucker ,

Please do tell once you’ve figured it out.

gomp ,

Here’s what I get in fish when I start writing a rsync command and hit tab to ask for completions:


<span style="color:#323232;">❱ rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-0  --from0                               (All *from/filter files are delimited by 0s)  --delete                   (Delete files that don’t exist on sender)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-4  --ipv4                                                               (Prefer IPv4)  --delete-after         (Receiver deletes after transfer, not before)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-6  --ipv6                                                               (Prefer IPv6)  --delete-before         (Receiver deletes before transfer (default))
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-8  --8-bit-output                          (Leave high-bit chars unescaped in output)  --delete-delay                 (Find deletions during, delete after)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[more lines omitted]
</span>
TeddyKila ,

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.

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.

jazztickets ,

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

vzq ,

Honestly, I usually just “man command” in google.

I know it’s wrong but my browser is tiled next to my terminal and it’s easy to look up stuff.

ParetoOptimalDev ,

I did this before being in emacs made it so convenient to avoid, but got bit randomly by different versions or gnu vs BSD.

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

jeffreyosborne ,

I like tldr. It doesnt give incredibly in depth explanations, but it does show the basics of using most commands.

underisk ,

tldr.inbrowser.app for anyone curious. There’s also a command line version you can install.

rotopenguin ,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

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.

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

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

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>
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.

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/

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