5 ms·

Browse man pages in style with your personal manservant

26 points by jimeh 14y ago

morsch 14y ago
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.
- Gjallarson 14y ago
  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.
  - petepete 14y ago
    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 http://i.imgur.com/MRKEm.png
  - morsch 14y ago
    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?
    - adestefan 14y ago
      info bash
- jimeh 14y ago
  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 :)
codeape 14y ago
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 http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html At least on Ubuntu, after apt-get install apache2, the URL above works.
- danbee 14y ago
  404 for me on Debian Wheezy.
rwmj 14y ago
Back in the day, there was xman: http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xman.1.html http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xman.1.html
Ideka 14y ago
tengo hambre
grimboy 14y ago
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.

26 points by jimeh 14y ago

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.

Gjallarson 14y ago
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.
- petepete 14y ago
  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 http://i.imgur.com/MRKEm.png
- morsch 14y ago
  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?
  - adestefan 14y ago
    info bash
jimeh 14y ago
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 :)

codeape 14y ago

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 http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html At least on Ubuntu, after apt-get install apache2, the URL above works.

danbee 14y ago
404 for me on Debian Wheezy.

rwmj 14y ago

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

Ideka 14y ago

tengo hambre

grimboy 14y ago

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.