I am reading a very long man page (man ssh
). I want to save all of that text for more convenient reading in a text-editor.
Unfortunately, choosing either of :
-
Edit → Select All → Copy
-
Shell → Export Text As…
results in saving only a screen-full of the text, not all the text that scrolled by.
How do I extract the text of an entire man
page?
Best Answer
You can push plain text to the clipboard by piping to
pbcopy
, to paste anywhere as usual.or equivalent
the latter of which is nicer if you want to use it as an alias, like
mancp ssh
, given:There are methods to go to HTML/PDF: Can man pages be converted to html and/or pdf format?
If it's just the nicer reading experience you're after, you can right-click on a selection of a command and open its man page as a separate window/tab, with normal scrolling and ⌘F find.
You can customise what this looks like in Terminal Preferences → Profiles, under the Man Page profile which is one of the default profiles to exist.
This includes font family and size (also see View menu) and background/foreground colours.