I think man pages tend to be more heavyweight than people sometimes; if I just want to see a few of the most common options to copy, it's a lot easier to have a few lines just printed out rather than having to crawl through potentially dozens of pages being piped to `less` and then open a second terminal pane if I want to look at it while I'm typing my command.
Put another way, I think `--help` is basically the CLI equivalent of generated API docs, whereas manpages are like long-form prose documentation. While you can get by with just one of them, the experience is going to be worse for certain use cases, and generally for anything beyond a certain level of complexity, your users will be better off if you provide both.
Put another way, I think `--help` is basically the CLI equivalent of generated API docs, whereas manpages are like long-form prose documentation. While you can get by with just one of them, the experience is going to be worse for certain use cases, and generally for anything beyond a certain level of complexity, your users will be better off if you provide both.
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