A few edits for the Basic Usage Doc page (#15215)

This PR corrects a few minor things and adds a note about colorized
output.

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/lib/spack/docs/basic_usage.rst b/lib/spack/docs/basic_usage.rst
index 56d60a29da..d63dec8827 100644
--- a/lib/spack/docs/basic_usage.rst
+++ b/lib/spack/docs/basic_usage.rst
@@ -25,6 +25,14 @@ It is recommended that the following be put in your ``.bashrc`` file:
 
     alias less='less -R'
 
+If you do not see colorized output when using ``less -R`` it is because color
+is being disabled in the piped output. In this case, tell spack to force
+colorized output.
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+    $ spack --color always | less -R 
+
 --------------------------
 Listing available packages
 --------------------------
@@ -45,7 +53,7 @@ can install:
 .. command-output:: spack list
    :ellipsis: 10
 
-There are thosands of them, so we've truncated the output above, but you
+There are thousands of them, so we've truncated the output above, but you
 can find a :ref:`full list here <package-list>`.
 Packages are listed by name in alphabetical order.
 A pattern to match with no wildcards, ``*`` or ``?``,
@@ -267,7 +275,7 @@ the ``spack gc`` ("garbage collector") command, which will uninstall all unneede
    -- linux-ubuntu18.04-broadwell / gcc@9.0.1 ----------------------
    hdf5@1.10.5  libiconv@1.16  libpciaccess@0.13.5  libszip@2.1.1  libxml2@2.9.9  mpich@3.3.2  openjpeg@2.3.1  xz@5.2.4  zlib@1.2.11
 
-In the example above Spack went through all the packages in the DB
+In the example above Spack went through all the packages in the package database
 and removed everything that is not either:
 
 1. A package installed upon explicit request of the user
@@ -854,7 +862,7 @@ Variants are named options associated with a particular package. They are
 optional, as each package must provide default values for each variant it
 makes available. Variants can be specified using
 a flexible parameter syntax ``name=<value>``. For example,
-``spack install libelf debug=True`` will install libelf build with debug
+``spack install libelf debug=True`` will install libelf built with debug
 flags. The names of particular variants available for a package depend on
 what was provided by the package author. ``spack info <package>`` will
 provide information on what build variants are available.
@@ -1067,13 +1075,13 @@ of failing:
 In the snippet above, for instance, the microarchitecture was demoted to ``haswell`` when
 compiling with ``gcc@4.8`` since support to optimize for ``broadwell`` starts from ``gcc@4.9:``.
 
-Finally if Spack has no information to match compiler and target, it will
+Finally, if Spack has no information to match compiler and target, it will
 proceed with the installation but avoid injecting any microarchitecture
 specific flags.
 
 .. warning::
 
-   Currently Spack doesn't print any warning to the user if it has no information
+   Currently, Spack doesn't print any warning to the user if it has no information
    on which optimization flags should be used for a given compiler. This behavior
    might change in the future.
 
@@ -1083,7 +1091,7 @@ specific flags.
 Virtual dependencies
 --------------------
 
-The dependence graph for ``mpileaks`` we saw above wasn't *quite*
+The dependency graph for ``mpileaks`` we saw above wasn't *quite*
 accurate.  ``mpileaks`` uses MPI, which is an interface that has many
 different implementations.  Above, we showed ``mpileaks`` and
 ``callpath`` depending on ``mpich``, which is one *particular*
@@ -1410,12 +1418,12 @@ packages listed as activated:
    py-nose@1.3.4  py-numpy@1.9.1  py-setuptools@11.3.1
 
 Now, when a user runs python, ``numpy`` will be available for import
-*without* the user having to explicitly loaded.  ``python@2.7.8`` now
+*without* the user having to explicitly load it.  ``python@2.7.8`` now
 acts like a system Python installation with ``numpy`` installed inside
 of it.
 
 Spack accomplishes this by symbolically linking the *entire* prefix of
-the ``py-numpy`` into the prefix of the ``python`` package.  To the
+the ``py-numpy`` package into the prefix of the ``python`` package.  To the
 python interpreter, it looks like ``numpy`` is installed in the
 ``site-packages`` directory.