man is self-paging and searchable. It uses some old-school emacs bindings like Ctrl + V from before PgDn was a standard key. So I’m not claiming it’s intuitive.
If cmd --help spews a bunch of info to the screen, you basically have to handle it with grep or less or go modern.
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, 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.
Love this, but now I’m also realizing how awful my workflow is in general. More than half of the time when I get into a groove I don’t even switch directories between tasks and end up just calling the relative path like an animal 😆
I legitimately don’t understand why people still insist on recommending it. Like it had its place, and it was awesome for what it was, but there are many better ways of displaying that info and better ways of searching for it. If it’s the only option, fine. Otherwise, I’m not parsing through that shit in a terminal.
I disagree that there are much better ways. When I have a question while I’m working in the terminal, it’s nice to have a searchable manual that’s in the terminal.
But I can certainly understand why modern manpages aren’t well-developed. That info is already somewhere else. And it’s good enough. It’s not like I’m paying people to write manpages.
man ls which would fetch you the manual for ls, which lists files and dirs for you. However, I think it’s more common for users to use ls --help instead, which would show the same manual information.
(sorry if you already knew this, but it looked almost like you were asking what this means and then a bunch of linux users just joked around without explaining anything XD)
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