i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?

[literatesavant@mastodon.au]

@b0rk (now I know the answer)

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

@literatesavant what's the answer?

[doekman@mastodon.nl]

@b0rk It is, right? FWIW: sometimes I use this function to open a man-page: it opens a new terminal window.

function yman() { open "x-man-page://$1" ; }

[literatesavant@mastodon.au]

@b0rk there are 8 "sections" of the man page. I thought they were "levels."
1: user commands
2: system calls
3: library functions
4: special files (devices and stuff)
5: file formats
6: games!
7: miscellaneous
8: system admin commands

So if you run "man crontab" you will see the crontab command arguments, and if you run "man 5 crontab" you will see the crontab file format.

[literatesavant@mastodon.au]

@b0rk if you don't specify a level, the default search order is 1, 8, 2-7.

[radieschen@climatejustice.social]

@clarfonthey I thought about this while trying some of the options. I came to the conclusion that it would be weird to tell a woman to (please) look something up for me.

I remembered that factory_girl (a ruby library to create test factories) was renamed to factory_bot a while ago. There is a blog post about it, the reasoning is similar.
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/factory_bot#why

Then I found a comment by a woman arguing it's potentially overblown and now I'm confused.
https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot/issues/921#issuecomment-243173849

It's quite an interesting discussion on feminism from almost 10 years ago. The maintainers decided to rename the project even though the comments that argued for the change did get a lot of thumbs down.

Another thought was that woman would be too much to type, I'd prefer something like gal.

qman looks nice, but since it seems to be slow, I didn't bother trying harder. I think I'll give batman a try and also found out about tldr and might test some other things.

I guess if there is a rust implementation of qman, it could be either called gal, or it couldn't.

That was an interesting and productive couple of hours of procrastination, thanks for the question @b0rk

[paniash@mstdn.social]

@b0rk I know you said no emacs but I really like the in-built emacs package called `woman`.

[clarfonthey@toot.cat]

@radieschen @b0rk honestly, I'm going to have to agree with the notion that people are thinking way too much into it

that said, I personally don't even fully type out most commands; for example, I have g aliased to git, and that's only 3 letters

[fanf@mendeddrum.org]

@rjbs @b0rk the BSD -mdoc macros are much nicer than the old -man macros: mdoc has rich semantic markup and some basic support for hyperlinks

mdoc is fairly nice to edit despite the dot-line commands and the terse two-letter abbreviations

and the mandoc utilities do a beautiful job of turning mdoc man pages to html

i wonder how well mandoc -Thtml | w3m works compared to the old w3mman wrapper…

[wookieeboy@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk because sometimes you just want a simple reading experience:

man -t $1 | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

@wookieeboy whoa Preview has a man page reader?? I can't get it to work but that's interesting

[wookieeboy@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk preview can open postscript files. I haven’t used that in a while. It used to be that -t on man would generate postscript for printing.

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

@wookieeboy thanks! I do get a postscript file but for some reason Preview won't open it, who knows why

[wookieeboy@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk I'm starting to think that Preview doesn't like to open postscript any more. Even a more verbose version fails to open

man -t sudo > /tmp/sudo.ps && open -a "Preview" /tmp/sudo.ps

[wookieeboy@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk Now I'm a little bit sad.

[marcusxms@helvede.net]

@flohw @b0rk I've loved having "fish-colored-man" installed, partially because of its name, but this actually seems even better. Thanks!