tmux and screen users would say that one can use the roff-based man system and still do that. The key is, rather, in what M. Bernstein wrote: "Much more effort

tmux and screen users would say that one can use the roff-based man system and still do that. The key is, rather, in what M. Bernstein wrote: "Much more effort has gone into web browsers than into roff readers." And this is true. I just recently fixed a bug in a 2018-ish man command that prevented it from displaying Japanese manual pages, because it defaulted to 7-bit ASCII instead of UTF-8. Any WWW browser that couldn't have handled UTF-8 in 2018 would have been junked by most people. That sort of stuff was fixed years before for WWW browsers. Indeed, there's been the reverse process going on. The effort that has gone into roff readers has sometimes even been actively suppressed. Did you know that your manual pages actually contain italics for emphasis and denoting certain syntactical elements, and have done pretty much all along? groff got the ability to display them, like troff originally could, long ago, as well as colour; but these abilities have been explicitly disabled in most operating systems. We'd laugh at WWW browsers that couldn't do all of <i> and <em> and <u> and suchlike, or (of course) their CSS equivalents. But we suppress the ability of free software roff readers to reinstate what Unix text processing could likewise actually do in the 1970s.