Comment by jmfayard

8 years ago

A lot of us are "newbies" of "tar", "find", "[" and many others after years and years using *nix. According to the anti-usability mindset, this means that the users are wrong and ought to be changed, and not an hint that we should rethink how we write and consume documentation.

Edit: the wording was angrier than it needed to be. A concrete example of a better documentation tool : https://kapeli.com/dash

6 comments

jmfayard

Reply
microcolonel  8 years ago

For what it's worth, find is truly awful, and tar is just a bit unconventional in terms of option parsing. These are stand-out failures of interface design, for which no documentation would be sufficient for all but the most regular of users.

mjw1007  8 years ago

Note that the commonly-used GNU implementations of tar and find both have info documentation which is much better than the manpages.

minusf  8 years ago

dash is web documentation kept offline with limited search added on top of it. it's basically a browser window...

  • dmitriid  8 years ago

    Which already makes it orders of magnitudes better than man

    • vthriller  8 years ago

      But why? You already can search through man pages with / key in your $PAGER (more/less/most/vimpager), and across pages with `man -k`/`man -K`, and I wouldn't really call proportional fonts as "orders of magnitude" better.

rene_bg  8 years ago

Thanks for the link to Kapeli/Dash - looks like something that could really make everyday work easier!