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Oh god please no, I hate the rare program that poops my terminal full of seven pages of output and I have to use like shift+pgup or the mouse to get back up to

by lucb1e 2y ago

Oh god please no, I hate the rare program that poops my terminal full of seven pages of output and I have to use like shift+pgup or the mouse to get back up to see the only four useful words of output: "option --anakyze not recognized". This also confuses the heck out of beginners. MariaDB also doesn't print the entire manual when it goes "syntax error at ' OR 1=1". It makes no sense. You can include "See --help for more information" at the end of every error to make sure everyone knows where to find that, though, since indeed not every program uses the same syntax for usage. 90% of the time I don't need a copy of a program's manual in my scrollback when I, say ,typo something or forgot that two options are incompatible. There is a reason scrollback exists and I use it for that purpose. I'll look up the manual or run --help in another terminal tab/window, or choose to run it in the current one at my own discretion thank you

danudey 2y ago
Just to throw this out there: let's also hate on programs that give you seven pages of output for --help but print it to stderr so you have to jump through shell redirection hoops to pipe it to a pager to be able to read or search through it.
xp84 2y ago
This reminds me of something I remember having installed years ago that would format `man` pages as a nice document (using... grotty or something??) and open them in Preview or something. I think it was on a mac and it was 15+ years ago. Genuinely my least favorite thing in the terminal is when I forget some detail about... usually CURL, since they use the capitals AND the lowercase letter arguments for very different things. So I end up having to use the / command in `less` to search for some common word for 3-5 minutes because the manpage is so disorganized. We have a much better tool than the Terminal for viewing long-form text content, so maybe I just need to alias `man` to open a website that publishes manpages.

by lucb1e 2y ago

danudey 2y ago

Just to throw this out there: let's also hate on programs that give you seven pages of output for --help but print it to stderr so you have to jump through shell redirection hoops to pipe it to a pager to be able to read or search through it.

xp84 2y ago

This reminds me of something I remember having installed years ago that would format `man` pages as a nice document (using... grotty or something??) and open them in Preview or something. I think it was on a mac and it was 15+ years ago. Genuinely my least favorite thing in the terminal is when I forget some detail about... usually CURL, since they use the capitals AND the lowercase letter arguments for very different things. So I end up having to use the / command in `less` to search for some common word for 3-5 minutes because the manpage is so disorganized. We have a much better tool than the Terminal for viewing long-form text content, so maybe I just need to alias `man` to open a website that publishes manpages.