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 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).