when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have?
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk same, I would only look at a man page in direst need, they are borderline unusable to me from the perspective of “someone who doesn’t know the command at all”
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk --help and man let me figure things out without changing context. sure I have a browser right there, but while on the cli, I want my answers there.
Red Hat drew the same conclusion with the use cases for their wonky Lightspeed cli LLM helper thingy.
ofc if theres no man page Ill go to the website and not really think about it.
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk if i’m answering a question about a tool that i’ve used before, then i’ll check the man page
if it’s a new tool or a new problem and i don’t know the lay of the land, i’ll probably read blog posts about how others have tackled it to gain confidence that i’m looking at a suitable tool, before digging into its documentation
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk I'm kinda half and half right now between `man` and `cmd --help`, I've been using `man` more since I have `nvim` set as my `man pager`, so I can easily grep for parts of the documentation. For example, today I was looking at a series of commands `git clone && git checkout $tag && git submodule`, and I thought to myself, that looks redundant, bet you can do all that with just `git clone`, so I grepped the git clone man page for `checkout` and `submodule` to find all the relevant flags
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk one thing that I don’t think gets enough attention:
If I go on the web I have to worry about versioning. Is my version too old? This doc might not apply to me. Or maybe the online post is too old and my version has newer/better options or features. Man page and -help are locked to my actual version.
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when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)
(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")
@b0rk I almost always do a man page (habit) or especially --help first. Though, unless I'm already kinda familiar and am just looking up a specific flag I usually also exit it right away because I find most quite confusing unless they already have an example usage that fits my exact case.
Then I do a web search for my specific need and usually find it easier there. -
@b0rk I suppose that adding a man page requires extra hurdles of not just creating the man page itself, but packaging your tool such that the man page gets installed along with it. Now you have to make a .deb and and .apt and whatever else, instead of just saying "download this script or executable and run it."
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i think part of the reason I'm feeling interested in man pages right now even though I rarely use them is that search has gotten so much worse, it's frustrating, and it makes it feel more appealing to have trustworthy sources with clear explanations
@b0rk Google used to show me what I needed quite quickly. The search quality feels like it declined, and I now know those tools enough I’ll look up the man page first.
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk what side of the line is "I search the web for the man page because the browser is the best view/search/scroll experience but the data is in man page"
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i think part of the reason I'm feeling interested in man pages right now even though I rarely use them is that search has gotten so much worse, it's frustrating, and it makes it feel more appealing to have trustworthy sources with clear explanations
@b0rk 100% agree with this. I sometimes joke that this is how you know search is so bad these days, that people actually have to use man pages now
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i think part of the reason I'm feeling interested in man pages right now even though I rarely use them is that search has gotten so much worse, it's frustrating, and it makes it feel more appealing to have trustworthy sources with clear explanations
@b0rk oh god I hadn't thought about hallucinated manual web pages
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