On: Simplified and community-driven man pages

[menacingly]

I've always felt like it's a ding on my nerd credentials that I hate man pages. A lot of them feel deliberately opaque.

2-3 good examples are what joe blow is looking for when he types "man", and he rarely gets them.

[reikonomusha → menacingly]

This wasn’t always true, when software was less replaceable and felt more valuable. Part of this cake from the fact that software distribution was more difficult. If you ever have purchased a compiler for example you might find yourself interested in everything you can learn about it from the manual.

Now developers are trigger-happy Googlers looking for the single salient example atop StackOverflow answers.

[menacingly → reikonomusha]

Or, more likely, somewhere in the entire operation of a computer there exists a task or two in which we don't care to specialize.

[chickenfries → reikonomusha]

The browser is a much nicer environment for consuming manuals than the terminal.

[apsdsm → chickenfries]

True, unless you're actively working in the terminal, in which case it's kind of a pain to switch to, I'm gonna say.

[JdeBP → apsdsm]

Nonetheless, it was the reasoning that underpinned Daniel Bernstein's slashdoc idea from the turn of the century.

* https://cr.yp.to/slashdoc.html

[ape4 → menacingly]

Of course, many man pages have an EXAMPLES section. You can search for it with `/EXAMPLES` when viewing the man page. On my Linux box:

    zgrep EXAMPLE /usr/share/man/man1/* | wc -l

Gives

   897

[menacingly → ape4]

and:

  zgrep -L EXAMPLE /usr/share/man/man1/* | wc -l

Gives

  1629