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Comment by lake99 | Hacker News Reader

> And it would be really nice if I could read man pages in the terminal in a proportional font, but preserving alignment etc.

Since you want proportional fonts, you'd have to be willing to leave the terminal already. If so, I'm aware of three options:

1. the classic, xman: fugly

2. the builtin, "man -H": it works sometimes. On my own system, the it's so unreliable that I'd call it alpha-stage software

3. and Konqueror. Works perfectly every time, but you'd have to install KDE components.

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Manpages are written in troff: https://manpages.bsd.lv/

This means that they can be converted to PostScript or PDF. There’s no portable way to do this with the “man” command, but on most Linuxes you can use “man -t” and on a system using Mandoc you can use “man -T pdf”.

Likewise, for HTML, “man -H” is not strictly portable, but only works on certain versions of Linux; a Mandoc system would let you use “man -T html”. (The only strictly portable, as in “POSIX specified,” flag for man is -k.)

Honestly it might be better to just get used to using an existing webpage for your distribution. For example, OpenBSD’s web manpage database (based on Mandoc) is very nice: http://man.openbsd.org/ls.1

> and Konqueror. Works perfectly every time, but you'd have to install KDE components.

For that matter, any KDE application that handles URLs can retrieve HTML-formatted man pages thanks to KIO slaves.

You want the source of the HTML-formatted man page so you can edit it and save your edited copy? OK:

    $ kwrite 'man:/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1p.gz'

KIO man also offers indices, as well. For example, you can get a list of all commands by going to man:/(1)

One could also use Emacs (in a graphical window rather than in the terminal) `woman` and `variable-pitch-mode`.

I don't understand 3.? Konqueror is the KDE3 web browser - how's that relevant here?

Konqueror is still included in current versions of KDE Applications (effectively 5.x, but the term "KDE 5" isn't really used).

Also, it's not so much a Konqueror thing as it is a feature of KDE's URL-handling subsystem. Any KDE application that interacts with URLs can retrieve HTML-formatted man pages. If you don't like Konqueror, you can always use Rekonq. Or you can open the source code in KWrite or Kate. Or you can browse man indices in Dolphin as if they were directories (though the actual pages will open in Konqueror).

KIO slaves are wonderful, wonderful things. It's the same technology that lets you use fish:// to access files and directories over SSH in every KDE program that deals with URLs (and since the file open/save dialogs are URL-based, this means it'll work with anything that uses those dialogs).

Thanks, yeah I used to use fish:/ and fonts:/ and a couple of other kio slaves, just not man, low discoverability I guess. I thought kio slaves had died with KDE5 [that's still the right name IMO despite the framework:applications split].

TIL.

Yeah, they neutered a lot of stuff with KF5 (the elimination of KLocale honestly makes me want to go back to Windows), but KIO is still around.

Unfortunately, it looks like fonts:/ was never ported to KF5, but fish:// and a bunch of others are still around.

Konqueror has man: and info: IOslaves (KIO plugins) allowing it to natively handle local man and info pages.

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