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Show HN: manpages-tldr – short manpages with examples

48 pointsby JIghtuseover 11 years ago
My small project similar to bropages and tldr, but (finally!) using manpages only. Manpages generated from Markdown files by Pandoc.

7 comments

dredmorbiusover 11 years ago
Note that:<p>• Manpages <i>are</i> short. The average length is around 4 pages printed, much of which is pro-forma. Some run longer. Shells in particular (bash(1) runs around 98 pages piped through &#x27;pr&#x27;).<p>• Manpages include an EXAMPLES section, though this isn&#x27;t always filled. That should be considered a bug.<p>• Manpages suffer from various projects attempting to deprecate them in favor of other forms of documentation. I particularly fault the GNU project&#x27;s attempt to shoehorn info in place of man (the availability of man to Web utilities such as Debian&#x27;s dwww largely wholly supplants this: info and the WWW were born within months of each other, Stallman and the FSF should have conceded the battle decades ago). Red Hat and the GNOME project have also been notably lax in providing manpages for utilities and programs. The Debian project considers omission of a manpage for an executable to be a bug, though not a release-critical one (I wish this severity would be increased).<p>• Fixing the deficiencies of existing manpages (and beating upstreams over the head with these until they&#x27;re accepted) would be preferable to creating numerous externally maintained nonstandard variants. <a href="http://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;</a>
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andreasvcover 11 years ago
Why can&#x27;t people just improve manpages so that they include a readable abstract and examples instead of coming up with projects with cute names?
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hfover 11 years ago
Elsewhere[0] I mentioned a shell alias called `eg` that jumps to the &#x27;Examples&#x27; section in traditional man-pages.<p>I made great use of it with the excellently structured yet rather verbose git man-pages.<p>Anyways, here&#x27;s the alias:<p><pre><code> alias eg=&#x27;man --pager=&#x27;\&#x27;&#x27;less -p &quot;^[A-Z]* ?EXAMPLES&quot;&#x27;\&#x27;&#x27;&#x27; </code></pre> Try it out:<p><pre><code> eg git pull </code></pre> (With older shells you might have to say `eg git-pull`).<p>Now as concerns the fine project submitted here, I&#x27;d suggest to try getting as much of those tldr&#x27;s into actual man-pages. This will at least make the long-term survival of OP&#x27;s labour more probable.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7167815" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7167815</a>
Jonovonoover 11 years ago
This was on here not long ago: <a href="http://bropages.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bropages.org&#x2F;</a>
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blueblobover 11 years ago
It would be nice to have an example that is viewable from the markdown&#x2F;on github. I think it would make people more likely to build it.
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fredleyover 11 years ago
This is the man I&#x27;ve been looking for my whole life.
CJeffersonover 11 years ago
hf: if you see this, I think you are Hellbanned. All your posts come up as &#x27;dead&#x27;.