i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
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@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.
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i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
(not emacs or vim)
qman looks interesting but on my machine it takes several seconds to start https://github.com/plp13/qman
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i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
(not emacs or vim)
@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. -
qman looks interesting but on my machine it takes several seconds to start https://github.com/plp13/qman
@b0rk Appears to be coded in C. Perhaps it is a good target for re-implementation in Rust or Go?
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qman looks interesting but on my machine it takes several seconds to start https://github.com/plp13/qman
@b0rk Looks like a nice tui version of xman, which is one of my favorite guis.
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@b0rk there's GNU `info` but I think you were probably asking about *good* ones
@SnoopJ @b0rk also pinfo ( https://github.com/baszoetekouw/pinfo ), which is at least different.
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i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
(not emacs or vim)
@b0rk https://github.com/filiparag/wikiman
or I also use Television for fuzzy finding and then opening the pages in bat with man. -
i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
(not emacs or vim)
@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.
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@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.
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i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
(not emacs or vim)
@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...
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i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
(not emacs or vim)
@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.
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@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.
@b0rk (now I know the answer)
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@b0rk (now I know the answer)
@literatesavant what's the answer?
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@doekman it's so nice! my dream is that somehow someone has made something like that for the terminal
@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" ; }
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@literatesavant what's the answer?
@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 commandsSo 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.
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@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 commandsSo 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.
@b0rk if you don't specify a level, the default search order is 1, 8, 2-7.
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@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#whyThen 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-243173849It'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
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i feel like i've probably asked this before but has anyone written a fancy command line man page viewer to replace `man`?
(not emacs or vim)
@b0rk I know you said no emacs but I really like the in-built emacs package called `woman`.
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@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#whyThen 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-243173849It'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
@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
galiased togit, and that's only 3 letters -
@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.
@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…
