this image comes to mind every time i use man pages
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man manIs it just me or is man and --help kind of confusing to understand? Idk, I just have difficulty learning the commands that way.
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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. :)
I find
--helpto be often useful, butmanis 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,manpast 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.
manis 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 --helpspews a bunch of info to the screen, you basically have to handle it withgreporlessor go modern.That’s because you’re a woman.
*runs for cover*
just need to be sure
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.
I used a tool yesterday whose manpage told me to look into --help for full list of commands. The audacity!
They could’ve just copy-pasted it! And --help should be a brief, easy-to-understand list of commands and explanations, not an extension
Some examples and common uses would be nice…
Yeah. I recommend the TLDR terminal tool. You can contribute command TLDRs. If there is a one for said command, you can type
tldr comadand it will give you some valid uses and example commands.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.
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?
Sounds like it needs better localization
It needs to die in a fire. All hail man pages!
That’s basically just GNU programs
tldrManis too much for me. I can’t handle that many words at once, which is why I like usingtldrUsing 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
man datealways makes me chuckleI first read this like “look, here is a image of a man” (-:
A miserable pile of secrets
Enough talk… Have at you!
Ecce homo!
curl cheat.sh/curlthis will be helpful, but looks like github repo is no longer being maintained
Yes babe I am real man, do you want to go skateboardz?
Does this horse have a dog’s tail?
I’ve never used it. Just typing /h -h --help and if that doesn’t work then I’m Googling it.
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.
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.
It’s learned masochism to use the terminal for everything at this point.
“help is an invalid command. Use --help for help.”
I always feel like an idiot when a read an error message like that.
spaceballs? oh shit there goes the planet
Back in the 90s
I was in a very famous TV show…
Guts’ theme plays
Just don’t use ChatGPT or Bing AI
I will use Google Bard then
You mean “history” right? Right?!
So many times I have looked up a command, used it and then forgotten the syntax. History is a life saver.
You would probably love mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly
Just installed it! Love it, and I just learned that ctrl+r is a thing.
Love this, but now I’m also realizing how awful my workflow is in general. More than half of the time when I get into a groove I don’t even switch directories between tasks and end up just calling the relative path like an animal 😆
Ctrl + R, what a wonderful phrase.
