Julia Evans explores what makes man pages easier to use, drawing on examples from rsync, strace, curl, and others. Key ideas include adding an OPTIONS SUMMARY section with one-line descriptions, organizing options by category rather than alphabetically, embedding cheat sheets directly in man pages, adding tables of contents and
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Table of contents
an OPTIONS SUMMARYan OPTIONS section organized by categorya cheat sheeta table of contents, and links between sectionsexamples for every optionformatting data in a tablethe GNU approacha few more man-page-adjacent thingsit’s interesting to think about a constrained formatSort: