this image comes to mind every time i use man pages

    • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
      1·
      11 months ago

      Is it just me or is man and --help kind of confusing to understand? Idk, I just have difficulty learning the commands that way.

      • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        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. :)

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I find --help to be often useful, but man 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.

  • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
      0·
      11 months ago

      I used a tool yesterday whose manpage told me to look into --help for full list of commands. The audacity!

      • Octopus1348@lemy.lol
        0·
        11 months ago

        They could’ve just copy-pasted it! And --help should be a brief, easy-to-understand list of commands and explanations, not an extension

          • Octopus1348@lemy.lol
            1·
            11 months ago

            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.