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.
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 newphonepixWould 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 useetc.
Or these?
Here’s what I get in fish when I start writing a
rsynccommand 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]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.
Bonus:
You can open man pages inside GNOME Help by usingyelp man:XFor KDE users, this also works with
khelpcenter.Thank you, that’s awesome.
wow I kept opening
man:somethingwithoutsectionunfortunatelyin firefox instead of doing that lol
I always add a space or two before the flag:
/ -xI’d also like some guidance on this problem (other than “use emacs”), but searching for “ -x” will have a lower false positive rate
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.
I did this before being in emacs made it so convenient to avoid, but got bit randomly by different versions or gnu vs BSD.
I am searching with /x
On most systems these days you can use regular expressions there. If
/-xisn’t good enough try/-x[ ,]or whatever.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.
I like tldr. It doesnt give incredibly in depth explanations, but it does show the basics of using most commands.
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.
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.
+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
You can set on what line on the screen less (the pager program man uses by default) puts search results with the
-jn/--jump-target=noption. For example, using.5as a value for n makes less focus the line with the search result on the center of the screen. This should help with your overshoot issue.Either set the option within less with the
-command followed byj.5↵ for the current running instance of less, or set and export theLESSenvironment variable inside your~/.bashrcto have less always behave that way.man -k printf Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword printf as regular expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent to apropos printf.info
boooooo
woman in emacs.
I also find info pages much nicer to use after an adjustment period given I grew up on vim and man.
Nice operating system. Just lacks a good editor
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).
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.
