qman: A more modern man page viewer for our terminals
60 points by dzwdz
60 points by dzwdz
Vim ships with a man page viewer, though it is not as richly featured as this tool appears to be. A brief comparison of features from my skim of the qman README:
qman seems great for people who prefer avoiding Vim. For those who embrace it, Vim already ships with many of these features and maybe you didn’t realize it!
I have used Neovim as my manpager for a couple years now. It’s a easy choice if it’s already your preferred editor since you keep the bindings + color scheme.
I use (neo)vim as my manpager and it’s great for those comfortable with vi. Still room for improvement of course. For beginners I don’t think it would be suitable. So this project is interesting to me from that perpsective
OK, I've gotten around to installing this and... it seems like a straight upgrade in all respects over man.
What am I missing? It's not noticeably slow even on big man pages (ffmpeg-all, I'm looking at you) and makes navigation really nice (t to get back to the table of contents).
Perhaps Xman might have been a better basis for something like this. It's quick and concise, and seems ripe for adding richer features.
Yeah, ideally I'd want my manpage viewer to support proportional fonts (and otherwise have "nice" typography) and "smooth" scrolling (as in, per-pixel, not the animated crap). That would probably need to be a separate project, though.
(I really want to write a "good" online manpage viewer, but I still haven't quite gotten around to that)
ManKier is pretty nice (though I've caught it misrendering a page or two), e.g. https://www.mankier.com/3/strftime
Oh interesting, I found it pretty slow to boot any man page on my machine (Mac Studio M1), but otherwise I agree it's an upgrade.
I would love to see some kind of setting to search by flags. Even if it was just a shortcut for \b<flag>\b
It'd be nice if a maximum width could be set. One of the first things I do when setting up a new Linux system is set MANWIDTH=80, so that I don't have to deal with horrifically long lines when I'm working in large terminals.
BSDs do the right thing here and wrap at a sensible and legible column by default.
My bad, it does actually support it. I naively assumed the only configuration was through its config file.
I should've read the man page. Apologies to the author.
My gripe about Linux distribution defaults stands though.
Seems nice enough. But emacs has M-x man built-in and imenu gives those sections already, hyperlinks are already clickable, you can use whatever search/occur/completion/theme etc. you prefer.
Somehow it feels more unixy to just have emacs read man pages (and use "general" emacs features like isearch/occur/imenu/buttons/find-file-at-point) instead of a having a dedicated man page viewer which kind of reimplements so many features which already existed in emacs.
Your average developer isn't going to use Emacs to browse manpages, I think it's great to have a tool for a more "general" audience.
Yeah, but from the page:
It also strives to be fast and tiny, so that it can be used everywhere. For this reason, it's been written in plain C and has only minimal dependencies.
I had been using pinfo's man mode with 'most' as the pager for getting colors where it would work and only yesterday discovered 'w3mman' and was blown away at the hyperlinkage.