For many, many years now when I want to browse a man page about something I’ll type man X into my terminal, substituting X for whatever it is I wish to learn about. Depending on the manual, it’s short and therefore easy to find what I want, or I am deep in the woods because I’m trying to find a specific flag that appears many times in a very long document. Woe is me if the flag switch is a bare letter, like x.

And let’s say it is x. Now I am searching with /x followed by n n n n n n n n N n n n n n. Obviously I’m not finding the information I want, the search is literal (not fuzzy, nor “whole word”), and even if I find something the manual pager might overshoot me because finding text will move the found line to the top of the terminal, and maybe the information I really want comes one or two lines above.

So… there HAS to be a better way, right? There has to be a modern, fast, easily greppable version to go through a man page. Does it exist?

P.S. I am not talking about summaries like tldr because I typically don’t need summaries but actual technical descriptions.

  • SchmerzboldEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    You can set on what line on the screen less (the pager program man uses by default) puts search results with the -jn/--jump-target=n option. For example, using .5 as a value for n makes less focus the line with the search result on the center of the screen. This should help with your overshoot issue.

    Either set the option within less with the - command followed by j.5↵ for the current running instance of less, or set and export the LESS environment variable inside your ~/.bashrc to have less always behave that way.