[tylerl]

As someone who actually DOES read the manual for everything, your objection about accomplishing nothing is BS. It's a bit of an upfront investment, but you long term efficiency is dramatically higher. You have time to post comments on HN, you have time to read the damn manual.

But as someone who also designs UX, I never design anything that requires instructions. There are plenty of good ways to make things self-explanatory. It's just harder.

However, command line UX is different. You can make the basics self explanatory, but you're so limited in your options that exposing the advanced stuff intuitively muddies everything else. So there's a trade-off you have to live with.

[abiogenesis]

While technically true, I tend to forget what I read after some time, especially tips and tricks that did not seem that useful when I first read them. So RTFM is not the silver bullet unless you somehow have a system that reminds you to re-read every manual every x months.