Highlight the current search match in man pages

highlightingmansearch

When I open a man page, for example man chmod and I hit / for searching a string in the page I can see all the matching strings highlighted.

Pressing n or N will focus on the next/previous matching string.

Is there a way to highlight the current match (the one with the focus) differently from all the matching strings?

Best Answer

This is controlled via MANPAGER.

Manual pages defaults to the pager of less -is.

You can just highlight the current selection:

man -P "less -isg" <command>

Or set the MANPAGER variable:

export MANPAGER="less -isg"

You could also use vim where the cursor is highlighted so the current selection will appear differently.:

 man -P "sh -c \"col -b | vim -c 'set ft=man ts=8 nomod nolist nonu' \
    -c 'nnoremap i <nop>' \
    -c 'nnoremap <Space> <C-f>' \
    -c 'noremap q :quit<CR>' -\"" <command>

Taken from Zameer Manji:

ft=man enables the coloring of the man page.

ts=8 ensures the width of tab characters matches less.

nomod removes the modification warning when trying to quit.

nonu removes line numbers.

nolist disables listchars so trailing whitespace and extra tabs are not highlighted.

nnoremap i ensures that we do not accidentally enter insert mode when viewing the man page.

Plus my own option to use space to paginate and quit with q:

-c 'nnoremap <Space> <C-f>'
-c 'noremap q :quit<CR>'

Set it as your default pager by adding it to your default profile:

export MANPAGER="sh -c \"col -b | vim -c 'set ft=man ts=8 nomod nolist nonu' \
    -c 'nnoremap i <nop>' \
    -c 'nnoremap <Space> <C-f>' \
    -c 'noremap q :quit<CR>' -\""

Related Solutions

Shell Highlighting – Using the ‘Highlight’ Command

Maybe Radovan Garabík's Generic Colouriser (grc)? It expects a config file as argument and works with regexp's. So not quite without configuration, but you can use process process substitution (<(list)), so by all means without manual configuration :-)

Dynamically reformatting man pages on terminal dimension changes

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.

man -Hlynx man

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.

$ export MANOPT=-Hlynx
$ export MANOPT=-Hmanlynx # provide your own wrapper to execute
                          # lynx with a different configuration.

You will need to install the groff package for man to be able to generate HTML.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell Highlighting – Using the ‘Highlight’ Command

Dynamically reformatting man pages on terminal dimension changes

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