OpenBSD man pages are what engineering documents should be. The contrast with Linux's is astounding.

This reminds me of a writeup by John Carmack. Last year he did a programming retreat where he set up a OpenBSD dev environment and tried to use the base system and the included documentation as much as possible rather than using ports and WWW†. That would probably not be so nice on a Linux system.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2110408722...

† Anyone else here that remembers the days when man pages and Windows help files used to be referred to as online documentation? As opposed to printed manuals.

The MSDN CDs where an endless source of amusement. The reference manuals were very good and search actually worked well. Did not feel crippled at all.

I don't know.

From `man wc`

    WC(1)                     BSD General Commands Manual                    
    WC(1)

    NAME
         wc -- word, line, character, and byte count

When in actuality `wc` outputs lines, words bytes ...

You probably referring to FreeBSD man, OpenBSD is slightly different: https://man.openbsd.org/wc.1

That still has the order wrong in the name section.

I mean, strictly speaking, the name field doesn’t document the output, but having those aligned makes the documentation much easier to read.

man -t is awesome!

IME it’s easier to focus when reading printed documentation. One can jot down notes and no temptation to go and reload Facebook/Twitter/etc. I haven’t done it often, but some commands are really worth knowing inside and out.

That let me looking into how to read them in an e-reader:

    man --html=calibre bash

Indeed. Never liked reading manpages more then when I was briefly exposed to OpenBSD. Really envied them for the concise and well written documentation they have.