𝓹𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓬𝓮𝓼𝓼

hard agree

is the fact that people can with effort and error figure out how to do something a reason not to make it easier for them to do?

I mean

you can in theory write multi-threaded bug-free C code – just read the docs and the specs and the source of your libs and never ever do something that seems to work but is subtly fatally incorrect

and yet we still have golang and rust and many other options to do things more safely and easily

if someone wants to use Linux but doesn’t want to memorize the Hundred Mandatory Commands and Thousand Flags lest they accidentally cat > /dev/sda, why shouldn’t there be a system for them?

as a professional sociotechnical problem solver I will join you on this fatal hill

like take the 4 types of documentation in diátaxis

man pages usually fulfill the reference need, and sometimes kind of that of how-to guides if you’re lucky and your local man has examples

but that leaves more than 50% of documentation needs lacking

and discoverability is atrocious – you have to already know that the command (or commands) you need exists and what it’s called

one of the most useful things I learned in a linux sysadmin course was apropos / man -k, which lets you search installed man pages by keyword. but hardly anyone else seems to know about it – I only learned of it because a teaching assistant mentioned it off hand! – and even then it only helps if you guess the right keyword for your problem

I am vexed by this situation

RÞFM

ftfy