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 --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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@RyanParsley to be clear for me i'm mostly interested in figuring out if the man pages can become _better_ so that using them is actually a good experience, not accepting a bad experience
@b0rk a general statement of when official docs feel not super helpful is when they clearly articulate what a tool does without managing to express why/when kinds of context.
A good blog post about a tool tells a story that docs don't tend to.
Why does `man stow` mention perl or Carnegie mellon's depo program? That man page is pretty good all around but does have stuff to skim over that doesn't feel like it's there in service of the user.
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@RyanParsley to be clear for me i'm mostly interested in figuring out if the man pages can become _better_ so that using them is actually a good experience, not accepting a bad experience
@b0rk when you say better, do you mean content or format? Like jq man page is pretty stellar on the content side.
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@b0rk For me, it is avery very old habit. When I started out poking at Unix systems, if I wanted to "get information from outside the computer I was on", I could, if I was lucky, turn my head and ask someone else in the same room.
Otherwise, I would have to fire up a newsreader, post to UseNet, wait for the UUCP spool to empty (over a modem), wait for the reply to be written, then wait for the relevant article to trickle back in a later UUCP update batch.
I will, frequently, after having opened the man page, start a web search pretty soon after, because many man pages are badly written (and I must say that good technical writing is a skill that doesn't necessarily correlate with "ability to write code").
@vatine @b0rk I feel you, with a twist: The first UNIX System I used was a Siemens SINIX machine at the university hospital, and it came with many, many volumes of printed out man pages! I was tasked with administering the machine as a Zivildienstleistender, because nobody else was around anymore who could do it ...
So I spent the first month just reading all the man pages and trying out commands. -
@RyanParsley to be clear for me i'm mostly interested in figuring out if the man pages can become _better_ so that using them is actually a good experience, not accepting a bad experience
@b0rk the man page for just is basically a less pretty help command :)
I suspect if people discover too many in a row like that and stop running that command.
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@b0rk when you say better, do you mean content or format? Like jq man page is pretty stellar on the content side.
@RyanParsley either!
(it's a little hard for me to think about jq because I've completely given up on learning the jq language, but I don't think that has anything to do with the quality of the 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")i tend to use search engines to find a tool if i don't already have one i think suitable.
for simpler tools, -h/--help usually works.
for anything complex, like curl/rsync/etc, the man page is usually my first stop.
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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 when I already know that this is the tool I need, the sequence is frequently: man -> look for examples section -> use search -> use man for extra details
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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 i highly recommend the tldr program https://tldr.sh/
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@b0rk FWIW, I first write the man page, then the code. Helps me clarify what the user wants, how I will interact with the tool. I then generate the README from the man page.
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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 man pages can be verbose, so I like the tldr utility that exists that complements those. I'll more likely use -h and tldr in concert to find what I need.
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