bropages: It’s like man, bro

I see the evolution of thought that brought about the name “bropages,” and I’ll admit that I too most often learn best just by looking at an example.

 

bropages is an extrapolation of man pages, focusing on practical examples and very terse explanations, rather than just wordy explanation.

And I am on board with that. I prefer man pages that include examples instead of just dry explanation because, as has been the problem even recently, words get in the way, and the problem compounds itself.

So bropages has its own niche that I can appreciate.

The actual bropages tool — which installs as bro — wins points from me for keeping things simple, but attractive: It is more or less transparent, it sends its responses to your $PAGER, and colorizes the results to make things easier to read. Those are all three big pluses for me.

And for what I have seen, bro makes it easy to contribute to the collective bro-knowledge, with bro add being the gateway to submitting your own individual genius … provided you have an account, of course.

There’s a social networking element (for lack of a better word) here too, with the option to promote or demote examples. For what I can tell, examples with high ratings appear at the top of the list, which might be an indicator of their usefulness.

Might be. I’ve already skimmed through one or two bropages and seen examples that I wouldn’t use, or would at least do differently. You could probably say that about anything, but I think the caveat to bropages is to remember that you’re relying on the collective intelligence of a vast swath of complete strangers. Buyer beware.

The AUR version of bropages worked fine for me; I don’t see bropages in Debian but I think this might be a new endeavor.

If you find bropages particularly useful, be sure to say, “Bro … thanks,” to your bros online. 😎