How do you navigate within a man page?

Man pages open in the less pager, so you move with Space/b (page), j/k (line), /pattern to search, and q to quit — and crucially, the same keys work in many other tools.

The single most useful thing to know here is that a man page is just text fed through less. So you're not learning "man page keys" — you're learning less, and less is everywhere: viewing logs, paging long command output (ls | less), and the navigation half of vim reuses the same j/k// keys.

In practice the workflow on a long man page is: q is your exit (not Ctrl+C), and search is your friend — type / then the option you care about (e.g. /-r) and hit Enter to jump straight to it instead of scrolling.

Gotcha: beginners often try to scroll a man page with the mouse wheel or close it with Ctrl+C and get stuck. Remember q quits and / searches — those two keys alone make man pages far less painful. Learn less once, use it everywhere.