willing to submit some patches to standardize the syntax of man pages in terms of rendering "optional" and/or "replaceable" content, and it seems like "man git-config" would be a good place to start: SYNOPSIS git config [<file-option>] [type] [--show-origin] [-z|--null] name [value [value_regex]] git config [<file-option>] [type] --add name value git config [<file-option>] [type] --replace-all name value [value_regex] ...snip ... can i assume the proper (uniform) syntax for the above would be (shortening lines): ... [<type>] [--show-origin] [-z|--null] <name> [<value> [<value_regex>]] ... [<type>] --add <name> <value> ... [<type>] --replace-all <name> <value> [<value_regex>] and so on. is that the consensus? i wouldn't try to do it all at once, maybe just a page at a time to not be too disruptive. rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca/dokuwiki Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================