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Comment by akl | Hacker News Reader

A move away from having man pages isn't necessarily a thing to be celebrated - a well-written man page is an extremely useful thing.

In the ideal case, you might have a quality man page that provides usage information and links to more detailed documentation (that would include tutorials, implementation info, etc.) on the web somewhere.

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I suppose the internet generation never really took the time to read man pages (nor to write one for that matter).

That's too bad. When I was getting started, the best documentation available to me was the man pages (this was before I had an "always-on" broadband connection) and TLDP's "Linux HOWTO's". I printed many of them and took them with me to high school to study in class.

It's great that we have blogs and such nowadays where anyone and everyone can contribute their own documentation, guides, tutorials, etc., but there was something awesome about having a single, centralized, authoritative HOWTO covering a particular topic.

I've always thought tmux had a great man page. http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=tmux&sektion=1

I pick distros based on how nice the man pages are. It's one reason I love the BSDs.

Oh man. OpenBSD's man pages. Whoever was the author. He was the best man page writer.

I have gotten so used to just googling for information that when I'm working on OpenBSD I have to consciously remind myself that the best, most useful, and authoritative references are already installed locally. And all ad- and tracking-free.

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