this image comes to mind every time i use man pages
man man
Is it just me or is man and --help kind of confusing to understand? Idk, I just have difficulty learning the commands that way.
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
--help
to be often useful, butman
is 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,man
past 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.
That’s because you’re a woman.
*runs for cover*
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 comad
and it will give you some valid uses and example commands.
That’s basically just GNU programs
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!
tldr
curl cheat.sh/curl
Back in the 90s
I was in a very famous TV show…
Guts’ theme plays
spaceballs? oh shit there goes the planet
I first read this like “look, here is a image of a man” (-:
man date
always makes me chuckleThis reminds me of the etymology of バカ (baka, stupid in Japanese).
I don’t know if that’s what’s intended or not.
Just don’t use ChatGPT or Bing AI
I will use Google Bard then