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I have no idea why but I wanted to hate this article. Maybe jvns shows up on HN too often and I was in a bad mood. But this is a great article and as someone with 20 years of development experience is about as true as any meta-level discussion on programming could be.

The selective vision thing is so true, both for `dig` and for `man` pages. I can't count the number of times have I `man <cmd>` and just felt overwhelmed by the seemingly endless pages of configuration options and command line flags. One tip I use for `man` is use vim style search functions triggered with `/`. For example, if I want to find how to output the line number of each match in grep and I can't remember how - I'll just `man grep` then type `/line` and hit enter and it will search for any occurrence of the word "line" in the man page. Next match is just `/<enter>`.

I'm also a bit sad to hear that Strange Loop is now finished? I only found them last year or so and it seemed like so many of the talks were exceptional quality.



> I'm also a bit sad to hear that Strange Loop is now finished? I only found them last year or so and it seemed like so many of the talks were exceptional quality.

You might want to watch Alex Miller's talk that has been uploaded recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suv76aL0NrA

And yes, it's sad that it ended!

However he made a very good case for why sometimes it's good for things to end. If you watch the whole talk it all makes sense.


Subtitles courtesy of DownSub (poor formatting my own). https://pastebin.com/isDPeBQd



There's also tldr: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

It lets you check the most commonly used options from your terminal, for example "tldr badblocks".


This looks like https://tldr.sh in a browser.


curl cheat.sh/awk # is the intended behavior, and it frequently goes into way more detail than tldr does. Both great tools!


Thanks, didn't know about the curl behavior. Nice!


> Next match is just `/<enter>`.

You can also press `n`




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