Man page vs online documentation

Wat. I do use vim ya cunt

>he doesn't know vim keybindings work in man pages

Use / to start a search. n for next, and N for previous.
This

OP here
i prefer online because i find navigating man pages awful

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wait, nano user here.
They do?

Online documentation. Man pages aren't in laymen terms

Your point?

Really?

>online documentation
>hey here's all the useful and most relevant options, here's how they work, here's some cool stuff you can do with them

>man pages
>hey here's 5 options intended for backwards compatibility with ancient computers and standards, hey here's an option marked "DO NOT USE, DANGEROUS" but it's here anyway, here's several options marked "you probably dont ever want to use this", here's several options that are incredibly niche and will only ever be used by a single autist once

TempleOS active_doc

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depends on what im doing. If I see an argument while im in the terminal ill just go to the manpage and type "/argument" and find out quckly what it does.

online forum posts because 90% of the time is as pleasant to figure out a man page as it is to read an entire IEEE specification pdf

>can't get on the internet because whatever reasons
>"oh I'll just read the manual page and figure it out"
>it's the future where the manual pages are moved online

there's other less obvious examples too. I spend time in a remote cabin from time to time. there's electricity but no Internet or in-door pluming.

my /usr/share/man is 120 MB and /usr/share/doc is 332 MB. it's not exactly gigantic amounts of data saved by moving it online

The true nature of Jow Forums revealed.
A bunch of children who find it too difficult to learn how to use the most useful resource in their possession and instead prefer to use highly inferior crap of vastly varying quality.

>t. boomer with too much time on their hands
Stack exchange and command --help are way better than trudging through manpages

>Stack exchange and command --help are way better
if you're looking for non-definitive answers and incomplete list of options / use cases, respectively.

stack * are garbage websites where misinformed pajeets give lots of bad answers. the signal to noise ratio is very crap.
It's not a source for documentation of commands and functions, it's a source of bail-out answers in situations where you have to out of the blue work with something you've never worked with and don't care if the solution you end up is complete garbage because it's 5pm on Friday and your problem needs to be solved in an hour.
If you're actually doing real programming you should know what you're doing and shouldn't be resorting to third rate crap like stack overflow where people will give you answers for points rather than to help you actually solve your problem.

Exactly this. Also manpages are really useful and don't even take long to read as most of the bulk you can ignore.

First --help, then man, then online documentation.
man command
Is just faster to type than opening a browser

man pages. anyone who says otherwise has nothing to do on this board

/EXAMPLES

Is there anyone who bothers with info pages?

Manpages for OpenGL functions. Truly a bliss.

I download the online documentation to use offline. Searching through man pages is the equivalent of getting fucked in the ass by a jackhammer. Only hipsters do it to feel smart. It's not difficult, it's just not practical and by the time you found what you were looking for I already finished my code and recompilled.

>apropos cgroup
>apropos memory
>either of these are hard
The absolute state of (You)

>not using info

Man pages are neat sometimes, but online search algorithms are usually better or more direct at finding an answer to your exact issue.

t. delusional people who either don't write software for a living or do so in a niche field and pretend everyone's doing similar shit

When you're dealing with 5+ frameworks and libraries on a daily basis, all of which change every 4-12 months along with your projects, finding the solutions that have been asked for tens of thousands of time online on your own makes you an autist who never gets anything done.

There are niche fields in programming where you're correct, but in general you're just wrong.

>miles
>not kilometers
hahaha BSD still stuck in the stoneages

Man pages are fucking obnoxious and I wouldn't trade them for anything.

Wrong. I use django on a daily basis for work, and the code I produce is decent, but half-assed because it's not important. For unimportant code you're right, but if you actually enjoy programming and want to learn more, manpages and docs are the best place to look, not stackoverflow. Same goes for writing your own personal software.

I prefer man pages. Reading online is hard if the trouble your are trying to fix is, say, the networking.

Most of what you need is then on disk, easily searchable. Also 'apropos' is really handy. And there is zero spam.

info pages are the superior choice. HyperText but is also offline.

>tl;dr you're a one-tool engineer
I've seen plenty of people like you. Yeah, it's fun to sperg and memorize entire API docs when you have "only one job". I don't blame you, being like that pays the rent and it's very low-stress compared to doing more. I do full stack and I don't have the time to sperg for a lark, the things I get done by myself would require 3-4 people like you. Having said that, I tried it your way before: it paid like shit and I got bored after a year. But hey, you do you.

>if I didn't read it from the manpages, I'm doing it half-assed
Sounds like your conception of using stack * equals mindlessly copy-pasting code and configurations. That's how code monkeys do it, but there's another way.

kek

django sort of implies full stack, which is what I do for banks and insurance companies, but I also freelance Bash and C++ software for a little extra money, though I lose a lot of business because I decline anything involving Windows. You'd be surprised how many rich kids want some 1337 hacking tools for (insert popular game here). I can't understand your mentality though, it's not fun to memorize, but it's fun to do things you never thought to look for by reading the manpages, and by doing so you learn more. Knowing more isn't the goal here, it's the process that's fun.

Manpages if I'm looking up how to use a specific command. Like if I want to figure out which switches I should use for grep or whatever.

Online documentation if I want to look up more complex tasks that might require several commands to complete, Like setting up libvirt with different kinds of networking.

>Sounds like your conception of using stack * equals mindlessly copy-pasting code and configurations.
Also no. Having someone spoonfeed the answers isn't the point, and usually isn't the best solution either. Figuring it out on your own will always result in a better answer than something you can find on stackoverflow, unless it's a very common problem, which would usually only be the case when it comes to writing code for work. Makes sense?

>Having someone spoonfeed the answers isn't the point
Now you're just strawmanning. Have fun with your autism, I'd rather make bux.

If you don't consider someone else breaking down a problem into highlighted, bold, and italicized fonts spoonfeeding then you're definitely a brainlet, and I highly doubt you know anything that someone else didn't already tell you.

>I take pride in making learning more difficult than necessary
Why not flip the monitor upside down while you're at it? Fucking idiot.

I did say before that the whole point is to have fun and learn things you didn't think to look for and couldn't possibly be learn by reading stackoverflow. Actually I'm wrong, since you could read the most popular and newest pages I guess, but I really doubt you do that, and it's still someone else's solution.

>search online
>6 gorillions entries with braindead-friendly solutions, useful examples, sane learning curve and ease of introduction

>man pages
>POSIX PROGRAMMER MANUAL
>By the power of free software, given a valid argument shell shall do as thee wishes
>options and arguments given in at least alphabetic order so the least useful options and commands are there as well before you even get to the point
>line 12950/15379 84% (press h for help or q to quit)
>EXAMPLES: exactly 3, the most used one is there after 10k lines of reading proceeded by 2 abslutely obscure legacy ones

Online is faster. Just Google it and bam.

I prefer Texinfo manuals. By the way: did you know that they used to refer to documentation viewed in the computer as "on-line" as opposed to printed documentation?

>p.s. there are guaranteed to be undocumented features like "the order of the applied switches matter"

I guess that makes sense. What a crazy world it used to be.

Nope. Manpages are files in the system, therefore they can be accessed offline.

Man pages but I read them with Emacs.

Using vim, press K while to go to man page of what's under the cursor.

whereis command returns location of binary, source and manpage files on you're system.

stackoverflow

konqueror browser/file manager used to be a nice man page viewer, just type "man [command]" in the url bar.

Neither, both tend to be horrible.
Write a fucking book.

>he doesn't know that you can access man pages from vim

Both.
When I am in terminal on a CLI machine, man pages.
When I'm not, online.

i would use offline more often if it was indexed and searching across the entire database was easier.

man pages are cancer

where would i even find online documentation?

anyone against man pages is a video game playing retardo

By finding a google cache mirror of a sourceforge page that's been dead for 8 years after 20 minutes of searching.

>cursor over "std::string"
>press K
>"LINUX PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL STRING(3) #INCLUDE
t-thanks...

Would anyone have a recommended package for popular distros that provides a nice terminal based interface for various documentation formats, like man pages, md, rst, and html docs? (read: something a package manager could handle the updates for)

I currently use a number of different packages: formiko (GUI) for single markdown files and restructured text, Zeal (GUI) for a more featured browser among its supported projects, xCHM for older help files and manuals, terminal itself for manpages... I'd preferably like some system that could handle these all in one, not rely on needing to download specific packages (like Zeal does), allow me to browse the docs remotely in a terminal session if need be, handle navigation between different docs and pages, etc.

On a slightly related note, would anyone remember what that one terminal-based application was that polled a web service for Q&A and documentation on programming-related questions? I believe it was written in go, and I remember they were featured on hookerneus at some point, which bowled their service over for a while. It had an "AI" sort of vibe to it.

You search online if you need an example. You search a man page if you need an exact reference. You dumb fucks

whatever gets me results
I'll usually check the man page before looking shit up online.

most man pages do read like absolute fucking ass though
some shit has been so bad that I'd end up sitting down and making a quick reference guide so I never have to look at the awful man page again, but that's rare

>texinfo
every info manual I've seen has had all the negatives of windows 3.1 style help files with all the negatives of man pages
>by the way: did you know that they used to refer to documentation viewed in the computer as "on-line" as opposed to printed documentation?
this actually did confuse me about OP's question for a bit