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

[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.

[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.