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Comment by lazerwalker | Hacker News Reader

Do you personally have recs for how to parse manpages? In my experience, I've found them far more difficult to grok than e.g. the MDN JavaScript docs. Particularly if I'm trying to look up a tool that I don't already have familiarity with, as opposed to e.g. just trying to look up the correct syntax for a flag.

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Yeah, manpages feel like the equivalent of being served a book on a subject where I just want to know a quick incantation. Like reading the entire wikipedia entry on cats just to settle a dispute on how many toes they have (18 btw).

I think manpages are a popular thing to worship here for nerd points but people don't use them nearly as much as they say they do because nobody actually wants to read a manual when they are trying to Get Things Done. Also, some things are just incredibly hard to figure out, like ffmpeg arguments.

Check out http://bropages.org/

Bro pages are a joke compared to the conciseness of man pages under OpenBSD.

> Yeah, manpages feel like the equivalent of being served a book on a subject where I just want to know a quick incantation.

Because manpages are from a time when reading the manual was expected behavior, searching for a quick incantation more often than not results in learned helplessness because you don't actually learn anything, just the specific spell for the specific situation.

I'm as guilty as anyone of trying to solve the immediate problem with a magic spell at times, but bropages embrace this willful ignorance.

not to make fun of my old roommate, but I had to give him line by line instructions for him to use a scientific calculator, which he dutifully copied, instead of taking the time to learn calculator principles. know your tools.

Except for being an online resource, the MDN docs are much more like man pages than what the parent is talking about.

Btw if you find the MDN search unsatisfactory (as I do) try mdn.io/search term. It's just a proxy for site:developer.mozilla.org search term + I'm Feeling Lucky.

Edit: https://github.com/lazd/mdn.io

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