Browse man pages in style with your personal manservant | Hacker News Reader

Browse man pages in style with your personal manservant

github.com

26 pointsjimeh11 comments

Looks pretty -- but the great thing about man is that it runs right there within the terminal. Switching to a GUI browser is a big mode shift and comes with all sorts of distraction. Using a terminal browser like links is probably pretty clunky.

Running in the terminal is the biggest advantage - moreover the terminal man-pages allow forward and backward search with vi-shortcuts, which makes searching them really easy and fast.

Less can be made a bit easier to read, too.

  export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\e[32m'  
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\e[0m'  
  export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[1;31m'  
  export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[0m'  
  export LESS=-R

Results in: http://i.imgur.com/MRKEm.png

The biggest improvement the web interface offers seems to be the outline on the right. For long man pages (man bash, I'm looking at you), that could be very useful. Anyway to do that in regular man?

    info bash

True, and I agree. Man is great to pull up in a terminal when you quickly need to look up something.

However when you're spending hours reading, scrolling and jumping all over a man page like I've been doing with tmux the last few days, smooth scrolling of a web browser is nicer. And the right-hand section outline helps too :)

I believe html manpages are built in to most Linux distros' default apache install (or at least easy to set up).

http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html

At least on Ubuntu, after apt-get install apache2, the URL above works.

404 for me on Debian Wheezy.

Back in the day, there was xman: http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xman.1.html

What I'd like is something like this that would also try and gather up stuff from info and /usr/share/doc/PROGRAM/ or whereever it is on the current system and possibly even online docs and try to present them in a reasonably consistent fashion, or at least have it all accessible in one place. But that's a little more ambitious. Also it'd have a terminal program that was a shortcut to remote open a tab in your browser and focus it. The latter would be nice for this.

tengo hambre

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