One common workflow of mine is to open a manual page in a terminal, then another terminal in which to test things. The man page is formatted to the initial dimensions of the first terminal. When I now resize my windows (or have my WM do that for me automatically), there is either a gap to the right of the preformatted page, or lines wrap. At this point I usually q
(uit) and !!
(run again), which loses my position in the page.
I assume the formatting process is quite CPU intensive, or maybe it stems from ancient times of fixed terminal sizes. The less
pager dynamically reacts to terminal resize events, so it should be possible in theory.
I tried perusing man pages, searching the Web, asking on IRC — the whole lot — but couldn't come up with anything.
-
Can I trigger reformatting from within
or outside of the man utility? -
Is there a version of the man utility
that resizes the page dynamically? -
Is there way to customize some part
of the formatting/display process to
make it update onSIGWINCH
?
Best Answer
The basic problem is that the formatting is done by one program and the paging is done by another. Even if the formatter were to get a signal that the window size has changed and reformat the text for the new window size, all it can do is feed new text down the pipeline to the pager. There's no way for the pager to know with certainty what position in the new stream corresponds to the position in the old stream it was currently displaying.
What you need is for the pager to be able to do the reformatting. As @Robin Green said, that's HTML.
If you want to use HTML but still work in a terminal, you can tell
man(1)
to output in HTML and call a text-mode browser to display it.That will display the
man(1)
manpage in the lynx text-mode browser. Lynx does not directly respond to window size changes, but you can press ctrl-R and lynx will re-render the page for the new window size.There are two other text-mode browsers that I know of: links and elinks. You could experiment with those and lynx and determine which give you the best experience for browsing man pages. You may want to use a custom configuration just for man pages and invoke a script that invokes the browser with that specific configuration.
You can put the man options you like into the
MANOPT
environment variable.You will need to install the
groff
package forman
to be able to generate HTML.