Comment by btschaegg
6 years ago
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`.
If Git on Windows can open a browser on a URL, why not just have that be a local HTML file? At least that works if there's a GUI and browser installed (rarely not the case on Windows, but if not you could include lynx and use that in the terminal as a fallback).
I think it does do that, actually. Definitely better in that it can be used without internet access, but I will admit that I have been guilty of thinking "if I'm going to be opening a browser anyway, might as well just google the question and get more targeted help."
Pandoc has the ability to output manpages from .md or .rst documents, so if you already have a web version rendered from those, I see no reason not to include them. I absolutely love software with manpages and leaving them alone just because other platforms (or simply just Windows) don't have them is a bit of an insult.
Ouch. I don't know if anything changed on the last ~10 years, but opening .md files used to open start the Windows help, with an indexing window, that never ended. And if you waited long enough (could be hours), it would open a small fragment of your help, with a navigation that could lead only to the system help.