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

[fabio@zirk.us]

@b0rk there's a script to use bat for man pages (aptly called batman) https://github.com/eth-p/bat-extras, for syntax highlighting and some other stuff

[quaff@thecanadian.social]

@b0rk I've been using tldr pages instead of man recently: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr-python-client?tab=readme-ov-file

Works pretty well and looks nice!

[phred@weirder.earth]

@b0rk bat can give a colorized version of manpages which is, to me at least, a /little/ fancy. https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/1433

GNU info is supposed to supplement/replace man on some systems but I have general frustration whenever I end up in an info viewer. (It’s emacs~ish but somehow even less friendly)

[tomi@mamot.fr]

@b0rk related but maybe outside of the scope of your question: I have tried to fire woman (mode from emacs) once. But it wasn't as straightforward as thought and I didn't dig further. As I spent more and more time in emacs, I used woman directly and had less need to implement the "trick".

The reason, because there is one except for using emacs itself is to have the ability to see and navigate the page with a menu and perform search, and filters with tools like Occur that I'm familiar with.

[rjbs@social.semiotic.systems]

@b0rk Ugggggh if you find a good answer, please repost it with a bright red light. I think the biggest issue is that the roff format is too bankrupt, and we need better linking primitives, but… I might just be jaded.

[acut3@infosec.exchange]

@b0rk I use man with MANPAGER set to `less -ic --use-color -Dd+g -Duc`. Not super fancy, but has a few colors.

[simpleanecdote@mastodon.social]

@b0rk there are too many to list. `yelp` (Gnome Help) comes to mind. `tldr` is a different approach. Then there are "smart" terminals, integrations, and a host of other things all trying to help us execute commands properly.

[notecharlie@social.bigcavemaps.com]

@b0rk I guess there's gnu's `info`... And of course each `man` implementation is different; I'm partial to openbsd's, but it is the antithesis of fancy.

[ladytel@masto.hackers.town]

@b0rk I use batman. It has colors and syntax highlighting

https://github.com/eth-p/bat-extras/blob/master/doc/batman.md

Edit: should have read the replies to not be caller number 5 linking to the same thing

[aerique@genart.social]

@b0rk @krans Girl!

[aerique@genart.social]

@rjbs @b0rk So we first need to convert roff to something useful?

(As someone who wrote an RTF to XML converter once in XSLT and Java I am not volunteering.)

[gduchaussois@mastodon.xyz]

@b0rk batman from bat ?

[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.