For many, many years now when I want to browse a man page about something I’ll type man X into my terminal, substituting X for whatever it is I wish to learn about. Depending on the manual, it’s short and therefore easy to find what I want, or I am deep in the woods because I’m trying to find a specific flag that appears many times in a very long document. Woe is me if the flag switch is a bare letter, like x.
And let’s say it is x. Now I am searching with /x followed by n n n n n n n n N n n n n n. Obviously I’m not finding the information I want, the search is literal (not fuzzy, nor “whole word”), and even if I find something the manual pager might overshoot me because finding text will move the found line to the top of the terminal, and maybe the information I really want comes one or two lines above.
So… there HAS to be a better way, right? There has to be a modern, fast, easily greppable version to go through a man page. Does it exist?
P.S. I am not talking about summaries like tldr because I typically don’t need summaries but actual technical descriptions.
As an emacs user, I use
M-x man. All my standard keybindings make finding what I need very easy.Of course, it’s not so fast if you aren’t already in emacs.
I want to mention that one can set the pager for man to be Vim too. Then it would load the document in Vim instead in less for display and navigation. This can be set with option
man -P pageror with the environmental variable$MANPAGERor$PAGER. I had set this up in the past with original Vim, but it required some special options for Vim as well. It was nice, but ultimately not needed; so I went back to less. Sometimes less is more.Edit: Here is how one can use Neovim as the pager:
export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'I kind of missed it and will set it to this now. Put this line in the Bash configuration .bashrc and every
mandocument is loaded in Neovim now.+1, displaying in a Emacs buffer solves any issues I could have. If you’re already ‘in’ Emacs, this will be more frictionless than shell scripts around
man