Is there a better way to browse man pages?

Kind of off topic, but you know what would be cool? If you had an 'man explain' command that would define all the flags/args in a command, like:

man explain rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -e "ssh -p 2222" root@$dip:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera newphonepix

Would give you:

rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
      --append-verify          --append w/old data in file checksum
      --progress               show progress during transfer
      --archive, -a            archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)
      --verbose, -v            increase verbosity
      --compress, -z           compress file data during the transfer
      --rsh=COMMAND, -e        specify the remote shell to use 

etc.

Bonus:
You can open man pages inside GNOME Help by using yelp man:X

I always add a space or two before the flag: / -x

Still waiting for someone to create Woman

I am searching with /x

On most systems these days you can use regular expressions there. If /-x isn't good enough try /-x[ ,] or whatever.

I’d also like some guidance on this problem (other than “use emacs”), but searching for “ -x” will have a lower false positive rate

I like tldr. It doesnt give incredibly in depth explanations, but it does show the basics of using most commands.

As someone with 0 knowledge of Linux (and very little of programming/command lines in general), this thread reads funny AF.

Honestly, I usually just “man command” in google.

I know it’s wrong but my browser is tiled next to my terminal and it’s easy to look up stuff.

As an emacs user, I use M-x man. All my standard keybindings make finding what I need very easy.

Of course, it's not so fast if you aren't already in emacs.

       man -k printf
           Search  the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword
           printf as regular expression.  Print out any matches.  Equivalent to
           apropos printf.

Sorry for my previous comment. I was commenting before reading the entire post and was missing the point. On a sidenote, its often enough and helpful to just list the options with program -h or --help . Sometimes the help option has more information or is easier to understand than the man document.

When I search for options in a man document, I usually try it with putting a dash in front of it as -x or --ignore in example. For really large documents sometimes it can help to add a space before it " -x" or a comma after it "-x, " depending on how its actually written. BTW the man program itself has a builtin help you can show by just pressing h while looking at a document.

I read man in nvim, there is a alias on the arch wiki IIRC (and syntax highlighting)

woman in emacs.

I also find info pages much nicer to use after an adjustment period given I grew up on vim and man.

info

You can set on what line on the screen less (the pager program man uses by default) puts search results with the -jn/--jump-target=n option. For example, using .5 as a value for n makes less focus the line with the search result on the center of the screen. This should help with your overshoot issue.

Either set the option within less with the - command followed by j.5↵ for the current running instance of less, or set and export the LESS environment variable inside your ~/.bashrc to have less always behave that way.

You can search via regex. For instance you know a section heading or flag is the first thing on a line preceded with spaces. I also find it earier to read with extensions for colors.

the / and ? commands in the pagers more and most less implementations should support regular expressions (usually BREs in my experience); which is the same thing grep uses. Consider reading your friendly neighborhood regex formatting manpage, if you are confused. As for easily scrolling, ^G to terminate your search followed by b (or your favorite vi or emacs scrolling bind) to scroll back should be sufficient.

Also, man some-manpage | grep expression works, if you didn't know.

Sorry it's not a very direct answer but this is one of the many things that make Emacs such a comfortable environment once you're used to it, which takes ... a while.

There is a man command and then of course it's just more text displayed so you can search and narrow and highlight etc. in the same way you do with any other text. Plus of course there are a few trivial bonuses like links to other man pages being clickable.

It's all text and Emacs is a text manipulation framework (that naturally includes some editors).

I use nvchad and pipe the man page into it

I've had this same situation happen to me before and my solution was to search -x instead of just x.

Man pages this, man pages that. When will the Linux community start really thinking about woman pages?

I haven't used lsp for a while, but it seemed like a good $PAGER.

https://github.com/dgouders/lsp

I have krunner with the man plugin enabled. When typing man:X in the krunner prompt, a window opens with a nicely styled man page.

@GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml maybe something like Tkman at https://sourceforge.net/projects/tkman/? Or web based like https://linux.die.net/man/ or https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/index.html.

In KDE, there used to be man: as a protocol that you could use from Konqueror or anything else for that matter. Does it still exist?

I'm at work and cannot check.

Permanently Deleted

As someone else said, setting less' jump value is helpful.

Another tool I use, mostly for the zshall manpage, is https://github.com/kristopolous/mansnip

It's not exactly what you asked for, but the fish shell has often explanations of what each flag does.

I lately often use chatgpt for these kind of things. It's amazing in breaking down the parameters and what they mean. Verify, especially when the problem is hard and apparently unfindable. Chatgpt won't find it either. It sometimes makes up things in these scenarios.

edit: You guys are allowed to not like my post but it really helps me so why not try it instead of just downvoting.