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

[rjbs@social.semiotic.systems]

@aerique @b0rk A tool that consumes roff will (I believe) never be good. (We could change roff but no.) We want a tool that reads something better and can fall back to roff. We can't convert roff-to-gooddoc.

Texinfo was meant to be that, but (I would say) failed. A subset of HTML could replace it. (And Texinfo can compile to HTML.) You'd then want a tool that know how to find the html for a given command/name.

It's "easy" except for the xkcd 927 problem. Sorry, this is not constructive.

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

@doekman it's so nice! my dream is that somehow someone has made something like that for the terminal

[aerique@genart.social]

@rjbs @b0rk Oh it is constructive. I'd never looked at roff.

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

qman looks interesting but on my machine it takes several seconds to start https://github.com/plp13/qman

[flohw@pouet.chapril.org]

@b0rk I use [bat](https://github.com/sharkdp/bat) with this env var `export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat --language man --plain'"`
This look like this.

[arrakeen_urbanite@universeodon.com]

@b0rk Appears to be coded in C. Perhaps it is a good target for re-implementation in Rust or Go?

[xmanmonk@mastodon.sdf.org]

@b0rk Looks like a nice tui version of xman, which is one of my favorite guis.

[vathpela@infosec.exchange]

@SnoopJ @b0rk also pinfo ( https://github.com/baszoetekouw/pinfo ), which is at least different.

[ingenieur@mas.to]

@b0rk https://github.com/filiparag/wikiman
or I also use Television for fuzzy finding and then opening the pages in bat with man.

https://alexpasmantier.github.io/television/

[puppethead@ieji.de]

@b0rk Maybe something like manx? It's for macOS but it is just a bash script so maybe it could be tweaked for other platforms.

https://github.com/jakshin/manx

[milo@types.pl]

@rjbs @b0rk this was my first thought lol. roff is incredibly cursed

[nafmo@social.vivaldi.net]

@b0rk Not replace, but this script opens in a PDF viewer:

https://www.softwolves.com/wolfblog/2024/11/19/making-man-pages-easier-to-read/

I did write a simple HTML man page render back at university (1997), I wonder if I still have the sources for that...

[literatesavant@mastodon.au]

@b0rk tangent: I've been using Linux for 27 years but I'm still unclear on why sometimes typing "man 5 {command}" gives me a different and more detailed man page.

[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`.