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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

I always end up having to google how to do stuff with CLI tools but GUIs let you discover how to do things intuitively. Tried using man pages but they're always slower to find stuff in and a stackoverflow answer is more likely to target the use case I'm going for.

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> Tried using man pages but they're always slower to find stuff in

Man pages are presented through less, so you can begin a (regex) search with / and hit n to go to the next result or N to go back.

If you knew this, I am actually very surprised you don't find information near-instantly.

I'm aware, but this involves guessing the right word/phrase and sifting through multiple matches, and there often aren't quick examples given.

> so you can begin a (regex) search with / and hit n to go to the next result or N to go back.

His point of that being slower still stands. I also find that just googling generally what I want can more quickly lead me to a stack overflow post with exactly what is needed, while MAN pages can be rather cryptic at times without reading the whole thing.

And some new CLI programs don't ship with their manpages at all. I've also seen some manpages that don't match the specific version/release of a program installed on the OS.

not super relevant here, but for those interested. There is a cli tool called `tldr` that takes in the name (of a tool) and prints out common usages.

I'm a big fan of this. Probably 90% of the time the tldr summary has my use-case covered.

If the tldr entry exists. Obscure commands don't have one while you're less likely to know these well. Chicken/egg problem.

In my experience the coverage is shockingly good. And if you find a case where there is no tldr, you're back where you're started having lost not more than five seconds. The failure case is graceful, so it was easy to put tldr into my workflow.

I wonder if tldr returns a meaningful exit value that you could write an alias/function for something like tldr $term || man $term

Definitely; tldr returns 0 on success, 1 on failure.

    tldr_or_man() { tldr $1 || man $1 }

> but GUIs let you discover how to do things intuitively.

The real advantage of CLI is that it is a language, not just a UI. It is composable, programable, remote-able and easier to automate.

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