man locally

Posted Sep 10, 2024 8:11 UTC (Tue) by andi8086 (subscriber, #153876)
In reply to: Contributors by Wol
Parent article: Man pages maintenance suspended

Funny side note... I used to do google "man fopen" and stuff like this and a colleague said: "Are you stupid? Why don't you use this locally" :D Yeah, but I am completely your opinion. Everything should be easy to find and stay. The man system is old and ingenious!

man locally

Posted Sep 10, 2024 9:47 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Funny side note... I used to do google "man fopen" and stuff like this and a colleague said: "Are you stupid? Why don't you use this locally"

I usually google "man fopen" or whatever. However I see it a bit different from you - running gentoo a lot of stuff isn't on my system so running man locally often fails.

But yes, the point still stands that "man whatever" is pretty much guaranteed to work, whether typed locally for a command on your system, or googled for something that SHOULD be on your system :-)

(And much as I hate texinfo, even a bare page that says "use texinfo" is a good starting point. I generally go straight from there to "how do I convert texinfo to pdf", which I never remember because I don't do it much ...)

Cheers,
Wol

man locally

Posted Sep 12, 2024 2:50 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

Pro tip: All of the GNU texinfo manuals have been precompiled into HTML, which can be found by searching the web for e.g. "coreutils [name of command] invocation" and clicking the result from gnu.org. They are all very nice, readable pages with sensible margins and fonts, and absolutely none of the modern web's annoyances.

man locally

Posted Sep 11, 2024 8:45 UTC (Wed) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link] (1 responses)

> I used to do google "man fopen" and stuff like this

I do this consciously for a few reasons:
- The formatting and searching experience is usually more pleasant (especially with https://docs.jade.fyi/, which you can also use offline)
- Having many browser tabs open is usually a better experience for referencing stuff than having many terminals open (even with tabs)
- I will usually have other documentation and searches open in my browser anyway and this means they'll be right alongside them

man locally

Posted Sep 25, 2024 9:25 UTC (Wed) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]

KDE's konqueror is a pretty good local, tabbed man/info browser. Just enter "info:/bash", "man:/fopen", "man:/", etc as the url.