Speaking of manpages:
âMan pages are great, man readers are the problemâ
https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/04/09/man-pages-are-great-man-readers-are-the-problem/
#rj7o6zq
(#rj7o6zq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I also wondered for a very long time why nobody improved the man experience in the terminal. Iâd love to see links and more colors.
#qxtffra
(#rj7o6zq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Colorized manpages have been a thing for a very long time:
https://movq.de/v/81219d7f7a/s.png
Problem is, hardly anybody knows this, because you configure this by ⌠drumroll ⌠overwriting TERMCAP entries of less
in your ~/.bashrc
:
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[38;5;3m' # Bold⨠export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[0m' # End Bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\e[4;38;5;6m' # Underline⨠export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\e[0m' # End Underline
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1 # Needed since groff 1.23
#gixfeuq
(#rj7o6zq) @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful â you can use it to write books:
https://www.troff.org/pubs.html
I have two books from that list, for example âThe UNIX programming environmentâ:
https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg
Itâs a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages â which I think is really cool. đ
Itâs comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf
) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html
). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.
On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, âthis text is bold, that text over here is italicsâ, and so on.
So when you run man foo
, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline â showing it in color would be wrong, because thatâs not what the source code of that manpage says.
Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. Youâre not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves arenât really aware that people use colors.)
If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.
#bsyxsjq