Linux @lemmy.ml GnuLinuxDude @lemmy.ml 4mo ago

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.

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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:

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

etc.
- Like this?
  
  Or these?
- You can just grep the help output
  
  $ rsync --help 2>&1 | grep -E '^ *(--append-verify|--progress|--archive)' --archive, -a archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H) --append-verify --append w/old data in file checksum --progress show progress during transfer
  
  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:
  
  man grep | col -b
- 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.
  
  Please do tell once you've figured it out.
- Here's what I get in fish when I start writing a rsync command and hit tab to ask for completions:
  
  ❱ rsync --append-verify --progress -avz - -0 --from0 (All *from/filter files are delimited by 0s) --delete (Delete files that don’t exist on sender) -4 --ipv4 (Prefer IPv4) --delete-after (Receiver deletes after transfer, not before) -6 --ipv6 (Prefer IPv6) --delete-before (Receiver deletes before transfer (default)) -8 --8-bit-output (Leave high-bit chars unescaped in output) --delete-delay (Find deletions during, delete after) [more lines omitted]

46 comments