Get the latest tech news
Man pages are great, man readers are the problem
TLDR: man pages support links, but man page readers neither display nor allow allow following them. Frequent criticisms of man pages are “they don’t have links to each other” and “they don’t re-flow if I make the window narrower”.
The actual format for these files isn’t the easiest to read in the world, but it’s definitely not worse than XML or JSON. We can’t easily add supports for links here: we need a pager which understands man pages natively. Copyright © 2012-2025 Hugo Osvaldo Barrera Content on this site is licensed under CC-BY-SA, unless stated otherwise.
Or read this on Hacker News