Read Manpages With Less, Bat, Vim or Neovim DistroTube
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Date: 2022-03-30
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Comments and reviews: 10
non
Unfortunately, under Linux manpages are of varying quality.
I prefer reading manpages over the newer and often more thorough infopages, which I regret that the whole story often isn't told in the manpages anymore these days, and I am fine with less as my default manpage pager.
I think to remember that the BSD or later FreeBSD had the most comprehensive manpages (almost similar to the Arch Wiki, but long before there were any Wikis, let alone Arch).
I cannot tell if this still holds since it's been two decades I last fiddled with FreeBSD and I am sure I have forgotten all from BSD including their ancient BSD boot system compared to SysV init or even systemd.
In the video when DT was editing his .bashrc I could see the definition of lots of environment variables therein.
Though there is no major issue with putting them into .bashrc I think to recall from man bash that the -correct- place for environment variable definitions would be the user's .bash_profile wheras alias and function definitions would go into .bashrc.
As I am writing this in bed on my smartphone I cannot check man bash right now in case I'm wrong.
reply
Unfortunately, under Linux manpages are of varying quality.
I prefer reading manpages over the newer and often more thorough infopages, which I regret that the whole story often isn't told in the manpages anymore these days, and I am fine with less as my default manpage pager.
I think to remember that the BSD or later FreeBSD had the most comprehensive manpages (almost similar to the Arch Wiki, but long before there were any Wikis, let alone Arch).
I cannot tell if this still holds since it's been two decades I last fiddled with FreeBSD and I am sure I have forgotten all from BSD including their ancient BSD boot system compared to SysV init or even systemd.
In the video when DT was editing his .bashrc I could see the definition of lots of environment variables therein.
Though there is no major issue with putting them into .bashrc I think to recall from man bash that the -correct- place for environment variable definitions would be the user's .bash_profile wheras alias and function definitions would go into .bashrc.
As I am writing this in bed on my smartphone I cannot check man bash right now in case I'm wrong.
reply
Chulito
Hey Distrohuggers,
The developmental version of Fedora 34 now has all Beta packages of Gnome 40.
Meaning you can download an unofficial copy of Fedora 34 and it will update to Gnome 40 Beta.
However, at this early stage, getting a clean install is unlikely.
The good news, is that by the time Fedora 35 ships around Thanksgiving, Gnome 40 will be in tip-top shape, with lots of improvements to xwayland, wayland, mesa, wine, kernel 5.12, rust packages, sound and Bluetooth improvements via pipewire.
I will finally be able to claim Fedora is better than Windows XP.
reply
Hey Distrohuggers,
The developmental version of Fedora 34 now has all Beta packages of Gnome 40.
Meaning you can download an unofficial copy of Fedora 34 and it will update to Gnome 40 Beta.
However, at this early stage, getting a clean install is unlikely.
The good news, is that by the time Fedora 35 ships around Thanksgiving, Gnome 40 will be in tip-top shape, with lots of improvements to xwayland, wayland, mesa, wine, kernel 5.12, rust packages, sound and Bluetooth improvements via pipewire.
I will finally be able to claim Fedora is better than Windows XP.
reply
M-t-
Just a few tips for people who may not know:
- You can clear your screen with Ctrl + L.
- Less has most of the same commands that you would use for a man page as vi(m), same navigation, searching with / and ?, etc.
- You can reload your shell with just -. -/.bashrc- (or whatever your shell's configuration file is called).
P.S: I never looked into the performance of less vs. some text editor, my gut feeling is that less would be faster because most people don't really configure it much, but that might be an interesting topic to explore.
reply
Just a few tips for people who may not know:
- You can clear your screen with Ctrl + L.
- Less has most of the same commands that you would use for a man page as vi(m), same navigation, searching with / and ?, etc.
- You can reload your shell with just -. -/.bashrc- (or whatever your shell's configuration file is called).
P.S: I never looked into the performance of less vs. some text editor, my gut feeling is that less would be faster because most people don't really configure it much, but that might be an interesting topic to explore.
reply
iAmTheArm
I don't use Vim/Nvim as a pager because I have a fairly hefty config for those, and while they still load up in a second I just feel weird running an app that has all the syntax highlighting, code snippets and all that jazz baked in, while less is still as barebones as it was when I installed (GNU/)Linux, so it feels way less organic, I guess. But I can see the use for this advice tbh.
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I don't use Vim/Nvim as a pager because I have a fairly hefty config for those, and while they still load up in a second I just feel weird running an app that has all the syntax highlighting, code snippets and all that jazz baked in, while less is still as barebones as it was when I installed (GNU/)Linux, so it feels way less organic, I guess. But I can see the use for this advice tbh.
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Mike
OFF TOPIC: I don't mean to jump in here with off topic subject but I just discovered 'QTerminal'.... I've been using terminator for a while because of the multiple windows you can have but qterminal does it too... I just looked to compare sizes and wow, what a difference. In fact QTerminal is small than all thee main stream variants I looked at... Come on DT, check into it... OK?
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OFF TOPIC: I don't mean to jump in here with off topic subject but I just discovered 'QTerminal'.... I've been using terminator for a while because of the multiple windows you can have but qterminal does it too... I just looked to compare sizes and wow, what a difference. In fact QTerminal is small than all thee main stream variants I looked at... Come on DT, check into it... OK?
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Mario
I would love nvim as my man pager. Bat doesn't look too bad either -
Guess I will just steal these aliases with your permission. I never actually knew this was possible.
I have invented some new aliases recently. You contribute to the growth of my list of aliases with this video. Keep up the good work!
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I would love nvim as my man pager. Bat doesn't look too bad either -
Guess I will just steal these aliases with your permission. I never actually knew this was possible.
I have invented some new aliases recently. You contribute to the growth of my list of aliases with this video. Keep up the good work!
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Peacemekka
why use -less- when you can just use -more- ;)
Also protip you can customize the default less using the LESS_TERMCAP.. environment variables and can slap full colors onto it.
More details probably are in manpage of less.
I've pimped less and it looks pretty neat.
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why use -less- when you can just use -more- ;)
Also protip you can customize the default less using the LESS_TERMCAP.. environment variables and can slap full colors onto it.
More details probably are in manpage of less.
I've pimped less and it looks pretty neat.
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Willem
Turn a man page into a pdf with a function using ghostscript.
pdfify() # convert man pages to pdf and open the pdf file
-
man -t $1 - ps2pdf - $1.pdf && setsid xdg-open $1.pdf &> /dev/null
-
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Turn a man page into a pdf with a function using ghostscript.
pdfify() # convert man pages to pdf and open the pdf file
-
man -t $1 - ps2pdf - $1.pdf && setsid xdg-open $1.pdf &> /dev/null
-
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Maximo
I sometimes use -BROWSER=links man -H $-- in an alias but rather use plain man anyway because I like it. But what I do use is, instead of info, a program called pinfo.
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I sometimes use -BROWSER=links man -H $-- in an alias but rather use plain man anyway because I like it. But what I do use is, instead of info, a program called pinfo.
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Lawrence
If you want a nice GUI-style viewer, KDE Konqueror recognizes -man://- and -info://- URLs. Those particular URLs give you browseable lists of what-s available.
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If you want a nice GUI-style viewer, KDE Konqueror recognizes -man://- and -info://- URLs. Those particular URLs give you browseable lists of what-s available.
reply
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