I intended to post in defense of manpages. I love manpages. I think most open-source manpages are high-quality, and a few are really outstanding.

"It's easier to ask an AI" can be true without implying that manpages are bad.

However, "man" the tool does have issues, and one of them bit me just now.

So, I didn't know about openssh client escapes like ~?. I thought, "surely that's in the manpage?" I opened the manpage (in less) and searched for "\~\?". No hits.

Of course, escape characters are documented in the manpage, and the string "~?" does appear. Why didn't search find it? Because man, in its infinite wisdom, decided to render every instance of "~" as some bizarre unicode not-tilde, which is visually similar but totally impossible to grep for.

This has also bitten me in the past with dash. DASH. A character that is critically important when documenting invocation options. man loves to convert it into something that looks like dash, prints like dash, but doesn't come up in search.

I'm sure there is a way to turn this "feature" off, and I'm about to spend a bunch of time figuring out what it is. But this is documentation for command-line tools. Silently destroying our ability to grep it should NOT be the default.