I read the manual for every appliance I have. I do man and help even before using the command. I look for multiple articlse explaining the how and why before doing something new with my computer and yet when I look for help many tech people are condescendingly telling me to read the doc. Well, I did. But I don't understand, because I coudn't grasp the concept, because english isn't my mother tongue, because many doc are written by great technician with poor writing skills that are bad pedagogues, and I would like someone to answer my question.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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English is my mother tongue and I still have issues with reading some manuals because they're written by bad pedagogues using jargon phrases that mean nothing, or worse, mean something completely different from a basic English reading of those words in that order.
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God yes. I absolutely LOVE a well written manual.
Even if you THINK you know how a thing works, itโs always good to find out the quirks and gotchas, not to mention functionality that might not be obvious at first glance.
In fact, I read the manuals before buying an item or piece of software. They tend to be much more enlightening about a productโs limitations than the marketing material is.
Conversely, it really annoys the fuck out of me when people come on forums and ask a really basic question thatโs answered on page 2 of the manual. It shows that someone is incredibly lazy and incapable of basic problem solving. And they have the audacity to get offended when you tell them itโs covered in the manual.
Half of US adults can't read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.
Some strikingly high percentage can't complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).
Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind
I feel like a big problem is that a lot of people never learned how to learn.
Adding onto your examples, I've also heard about a study once where they were given similar basic Excel tasks. However, you didn't even have to solve the tasks. Instead, just trying to get help from the help function or searching online got you into the highest skill bracket. That bracket ended up being the smallest group.
It must be nice to be able to read and recall.
Never forget what they took from us.
copypasta levels
Sorry, I have a chronic medical condition that makes reading manuals physically painful, which prevents me from reading the manual until I encounter a problem that requires me to read it, at which point I will have likely discarded it. And if I haven't, I will only read through the part that contains the information I need to know to solve the problem and then immediately forget it after.
My biggest annoyance with man pages are that built-ins are a separate command and that there is no way to print all man pages but the first with the man command. That's right. There's no way to print every page for a command, 1 through 7 or whatever, with a flag. I am confidently saying there's no way to do it.
๐
Hoping someone wants to correct me because I want an alias that prints all pages as one. Would also be nice if it did it for built-ins.
Honestly, who has the time? I could read the manual or I could enjoy my life instead.
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RTFDS is the equivalent for electric engineering enthusiasts. Itโs supposed to be tedious af, but I honestly enjoy reading data sheets for some god forsaken reason.
Started a new job as a tool tech in a rental center; maintaining, repairing, and simply showing people how to operate, a ton of different tools, some of which I've never even seen before.
First thing I did is setup a file share on my server that I've populated with 70+ manuals and growing by the day...
Read through them all myself to understand the nuances of each machine and be able to explain the details to customers; plus I can print them a fresh copy on demand just for good measure.