alt Hacker News> It would be amazing if there were some kind of universal system to make it easy to look up a specific option in a man page (“what does -a do?”). The best trick I know is use the man pager to search for something like ^ *-a but I never remember to do it and instead just end up going through every instance of -a in the man page until I find what I’m looking for.
Maybe what we need is a better man page reader?
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shikaan • today at 6:29 PM
I have played with that idea for a while until I realized I was creating a poor man's web browser in the terminal.
At that point I started wondering if converting my man folder to HTML and using lynx[1] wasn't a better idea.
I ended up using vanilla man again.
Are there better/fancier manpage readers out there that can change my mind?
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I've always been baffled why we just hand the man pages over to a normal pager rather than something that actually understands their structure. That "look up a flag" case is exactly what bothers me constantly when viewing man pages. And the search they say they should be using doesn't even work consistently since the flag might not be the first non-whitespace thing on a line if there's aliases.