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.
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 -hor--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
-xor--ignorein 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 pressinghwhile looking at a document.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.
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 pageror with the environmental variable$MANPAGERor$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:
export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'I kind of missed it and will set it to this now. Put this line in the Bash configuration .bashrc and every
mandocument is loaded in Neovim now.+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
Man pages this, man pages that. When will the Linux community start really thinking about woman pages?
What’s a womanual?
That’s the point.
I thought it would be clear that
we should start calling them womanualsthis was a joke.
Woman in emacs
I always add a space or two before the flag:
/ -xI am searching with /x
On most systems these days you can use regular expressions there. If
/-xisn’t good enough try/-x[ ,]or whatever.I’d also like some guidance on this problem (other than “use emacs”), but searching for “ -x” will have a lower false positive rate
I have krunner with the man plugin enabled. When typing man:X in the krunner prompt, a window opens with a nicely styled man page.
Even quicker is “#X”
I did not know that. Thank you.
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
mancommand 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).
Bonus:
You can open man pages inside GNOME Help by usingyelp man:Xwow I kept opening
man:somethingwithoutsectionunfortunatelyin firefox instead of doing that loldeleted by creator
Thank you, that’s awesome.
I’ve had this same situation happen to me before and my solution was to search
-xinstead of justx.info
boooooo
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.
As someone else said, setting less’ jump value is helpful.
Another tool I use, mostly for the zshall manpage, is https://github.com/kristopolous/mansnip
It’s not exactly what you asked for, but the
fishshell has often explanations of what each flag does.As someone with 0 knowledge of Linux (and very little of programming/command lines in general), this thread reads funny AF.
We are deep in the technical weeds here. 95% of Linux usage really doesn’t require such humour unfortunately.
