Most of what you say is useful common sense, but the bit about not bothering with manpages is plain evil. If anything, the man page must be written before the program interface!
Is there a usage statistic for how often man pages are read? I violently agreed with the article here. There are zero times I wouldn’t rather switch to a browser. Even if I had to dig up my phone from my pocket and search for help there, I’d much rather do that.
Also, more and more tools are cross platform and man pages aren’t a thing on windows (are they?).
I don't have any statistic, but I use them all the time.
Under vim's default configuration, manpages are a single keypress away. If you press "K", vim opens a window with the manpage of the word under the cursor. It happens instantaneously, and it uses the same font and color scheme than your code. I would really hate it if it opened a browser!
Really? So if I make a man page for my CLI tool you would assault me physically?
You should take your own description of your beliefs as a red flag to reassess them.
I use a few tools that don’t have man pages and I always find it jarring that I have to leave the CLI to get some basic usage info.
There is already tooling to generate manages and online/html docs from a single source. Reasonable thing seems to be “do both”. I’m not persuaded by “Windows is leaking.”
