Comment by bfirsh

Yes, but many apps show help text when incorrect arguments are provided so, it’s an error in those cases. The dev probably doesn’t want to bother with using different output channels for the same help text.

> "Don’t bother with man pages." Strongly disagree.

Me too. I don’t want to jump to a different program, plus man pages are greppable. And you want the man pages that apply to the machine you’re using (versions, etc) — especially important when you’re using a remote machine (think how common then idiom is to do `ssh foo man blah|less` )

> "Don’t bother with man pages." Strongly disagree.

Me as well. Though I am not against well linked documentation on the web. But man pages provide several unique advantages.

- Because man pages are installed with the same package the software comes in, their version matches exactly to the version of the installed software.

- Man pages don't require an internet connection or a running server. The internet connection can be a problem in certain kinds of enterprise networks, embedded system or during my commute in the train. The running server costs money who might not be willing to spend it as long as I would like to use the software.

- Linking from the executable to the web is tricky. Does the terminal support clickable links? Which browser should I start? Does it help the user in any way to start a browser on a far away machine that he connected to through ssh, mosh, telnet or morse code over avian carrier?

- It is very easy and safe to open a man page to an unknown command. You can be sure the command is not executed by accident. If I have to type `some-command --help` I am never sure if this is one of those commands that doesn't accept --help and does something stupid instead.

Despite all these advantages of man pages or offline available documentation I also like good online documentation. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ comes to my mind when thinking about excellent software documentation. Granted it is not a one-minute tutorial for the latest newbie. But for someone using that piece of software for years, its value cannot be overstated imho.

While I regularly rely on `man` (and would agree with you for systems that have it), I'd also like to add that you should consider people on other systems, as well.

I'm still stuck on Windows for work, and e.g. the way Git (at least the Windows version from git-scm.org) handles this is problematic.

Something like `git --help` will open the URL to a help page (that also takes ages to load) in the browser. Manpages don't exist and there is no useful substitute. And this in a Git distribution that ships with its own GNU environment (MSYS2). And then, there's Git LFS, for which I haven't even found a working help command yet.

While the original idea might have been that the terminal way of looking things up is too confusing for Windows users (which I find ironic, given that said users installed a terminal program), I find it still makes Git even more arcane on this platform.

Edit: Coming back to `man`: Git is in the useful position of shipping their own GNU environment. That means, they could still introduce manpages. Other, small CLI utilities usually don't have that luxury. In those cases, some kind of access to the information in the manpage would still be very handy, even if it is just in `tool --help`.

I think (correct me if im wrong) tools shells like fish and zsh use the man pages to extract the param suggestions. That saves me so much time

I’ve been learning Perl lately, and was surprised and pleased to learn that the built-in pod2usage() functionality for converting POD documentation in your program into --help output also automatically supports manpage output. So the Perl programs I’ve been writing all include this as part of their arg-parsing loop:

  pod2usage(-verbose => 1) if /^(-h|--help)$/;
  pod2usage(-verbose => 2) if /^--man$/;

That second line is all it takes to produce a manpage too. Then it’s just a matter of writing the POD documentation for it.

It is admittedly a little unusual to consume a manpage by typing `someprog --man` instead of typing `man someprog`, but it’s very convenient for self-contained scripts.

I write docs as a plain text file (in /usr/share/doc), works everywhere, view with anything in any way you want, locally or in the web, no converters needed.

I don't agree. Fail fast fail hard or you deliberately lie and confuse your users.

If I make a mistake - tell me. If you allow me to do it slightly wrong then suddenly in my universe there is no consistency between commands and that is way worse than being told what I did wrong.

I mean if you did that how would you access 'quit' if it is defined? It's a bit more complicated than it seems.

Though I get your general point.

I don't have any statistic, but I use them all the time.

Under vim's default configuration, manpages are a single keypress away. If you press "K", vim opens a window with the manpage of the word under the cursor. It happens instantaneously, and it uses the same font and color scheme than your code. I would really hate it if it opened a browser!

Really? So if I make a man page for my CLI tool you would assault me physically?

You should take your own description of your beliefs as a red flag to reassess them.

I use a few tools that don’t have man pages and I always find it jarring that I have to leave the CLI to get some basic usage info.

There is already tooling to generate manages and online/html docs from a single source. Reasonable thing seems to be “do both”. I’m not persuaded by “Windows is leaking.”