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Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

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31–40 of 53 posts

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#31

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at a man page. One of the more useless pieces of advice Linux beginners are given is to `man [tool]`. The documentation often has tonnes of useless information and no examples. It's frustrating, and it's also why projects like tldr[0] have gotten so popular. But, the page linked in the…

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable... just like any other man page. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at replacements for man pages. In your average man page, I can look up even the most obscure option and know exactly how to use it and what it actually does. With a detailed enough man page, I don't even need to look anywhere else much of the time. It ir…

I have never heard of bro pages before. It sounded like a pejorative but it's actually a thing http://bropages.org/. I find them to be a lot of wasted time too and totally agree about the hyperlinks. As far as searching man pages, I do pretty well with the trusty forward slash. Would you prefer more semantic searching like google?

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#32
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the idea of creating a tool which is more like a tutorial for commands rather than the reference that `man` is. Has anyone made something like that before? I thought of giving it a name like `tutor`. Where you can use it without arguments for a general shell tutorial and with arguments for a mini-tutorial about a command $ tutor Welcome to the Bash command shell. This is a short tutorial about how (and why) to…

How about tldr-pages? [1] [1] https://tldr-pages.github.io/

That does look a lot better! Bit weird that the main client requires Node.JS though.

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#33
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a while I had a printout of the bash manpage, neatly bound. It's something like 60 pages. Nroff actually produces great print output, which hardly anyone ever uses it for these days.

I don't think anything matches paper in terms of annotatability. I print things put all the time to just mark them up with red pen.

I don't know, I saw a Microsoft surface commercial the other day... /s

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#34
post #15

I love that they try to make it assessible. But I disagree with that it would be an acceptable goal in git just to understand a subset of it. You need to understand nearly everything, even the internals. Only then it can really become useful to you. The mistake the community made is putting git on the throne of version control. It's not. It's a tool for experts that can do a lot for you if you know how to use it. But…

Potentially dumb question here, but couldn't 'dragging out the inevitable' be another way of phrasing 'the learning process'? It seems that immediately making a tool usable would be preferable to keeping it as a purely theoretical device until it's fully learned.

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#35

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at a man page. One of the more useless pieces of advice Linux beginners are given is to `man [tool]`. The documentation often has tonnes of useless information and no examples. It's frustrating, and it's also why projects like tldr[0] have gotten so popular. But, the page linked in the…

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable... just like any other man page. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at replacements for man pages. In your average man page, I can look up even the most obscure option and know exactly how to use it and what it actually does. With a detailed enough man page, I don't even need to look anywhere else much of the time. It ir…

>solving the real problems of man pages (which I'd say there are two: lack of hyperlinks and poor searchability

texinfo (info) has hyperlinks, and I can search through multiple manuals if that's what you mean by searchability. And it's probably already installed on your system.

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#36

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at a man page. One of the more useless pieces of advice Linux beginners are given is to `man [tool]`. The documentation often has tonnes of useless information and no examples. It's frustrating, and it's also why projects like tldr[0] have gotten so popular. But, the page linked in the…

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable... just like any other man page. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at replacements for man pages. In your average man page, I can look up even the most obscure option and know exactly how to use it and what it actually does. With a detailed enough man page, I don't even need to look anywhere else much of the time. It ir…

> lack of hyperlinks and poor searchability

Meet Daniel J. Bernstein's slashdoc.

* http://cr.yp.to/slashdoc.html

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable... just like any other man page. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at replacements for man pages. In your average man page, I can look up even the most obscure option and know exactly how to use it and what it actually does. With a detailed enough man page, I don't even need to look anywhere else much of the time. It ir…

>solving the real problems of man pages (which I'd say there are two: lack of hyperlinks and poor searchability texinfo (info) has hyperlinks, and I can search through multiple manuals if that's what you mean by searchability. And it's probably already installed on your system.

I can never remember which manual page contains a description of struct timespec, for example. Running apropos or man -k didn't help me. I only found out it's time.h(0p) by a lucky guess.

Info is actually a quite decent idea, it's just executed poorly. Info pages are written like books, while I really miss the concise lexicon-like format of man pages. And it doesn't help that the default GNU info viewer is on one hand unusable for someone who isn't already an Emacs user, and on the other redundant for Emacs users. (I am the former. Fortunately, there's pinfo.)

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very useful comment. I think the same could be said about C. It should not be put on the throne of "programming language" - you need to actually read and understand what it does internally. (pointers etc) - it's not enough to learn some incantations. So then let me ask: is there a room for x, where git:x::C:python (git is to x, as C is to Python). People everywhere deserve to have x. Not just right-clicking…

Mercurial. I'm not being flippant; the UX is light years ahead in terms of accessibility to newcomers to dvcs. With a ui like tortoisehg, even five years ago, someone without any prior experience in any vcs at all could become productive after a fifteen minute primer. Git does not compare.

It also makes sense, I think, considering that Git consists of small tools interacting with each other, while Hg is written as a whole application/system by itself, which can then be extended as needed.

Re: Giteveryday – A useful minimum set of commands for Everyday Git

#39
post #8

Wow, a man page that is actually readable and understandable. I've been using Linux for years, and never once have I seriously looked at a man page. One of the more useless pieces of advice Linux beginners are given is to `man [tool]`. The documentation often has tonnes of useless information and no examples. It's frustrating, and it's also why projects like tldr[0] have gotten so popular. But, the page linked in the…

> One of the more useless pieces of advice Linux beginners are given is to `man [tool]`. On the other hand, when I was first introduced to Linux ~20 years ago, I didn't have an "always-on" Internet connection and web sites weren't that popular. Probably 90% of what I learned in the first few years or so came from the man pages and a locally downloaded copy of the guides and howto's from TLDP [0]. I might also mention…

Similar situation for me. My first Linux distribution was Red Hat 5.2 which included an off-line copy of the Linux Documentation Project on the CD (as did other contemporary distros such as Mandrake). Since I only had a slow dial-up connection, I found these off-line copies to be an invaluable resource. I remember using Lynx to read Guides and Howtos during the two weeks it took me to get X working on my old laptop.

After those early days, I hadn’t looked at the LDP site in ages but about 4/5 years ago I looked at the project again with a view towards contributing (now that I know more about GNU/Linux and Unix in general). However, it looks like the project was (is) largely moribund and I got the impression that the active community had dwindled significantly over the past 15 years or so – which is a pity.

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