FreeBSD Terminal – How to Make man(1) Use Entire Terminal Width

freebsdmanterminal

I'm on FreeBSD, using a wide xterm with, say, 132 characters per line.
When running

$ man man

the manual page is formatted to fit an 80 character per line terminal width.
Is there a way to make the formatter (groff, grotty) use a line width I specify?

I read the manuals for man(1) and groff(1) but could not find an appropriate option. I know it can be done, since I have seen it work on some Linux distro.

Best Answer

Ony my Linux systems, man 1 man mentions the MANWIDTH environment variable, which, now that I look it up, is also specified in the FreeBSD man(1) manpage:

MANWIDTH     If set to a numeric value, used as the width manpages should
             be displayed.  Otherwise, if set to a special value ``tty'',
             and output is to a terminal, the pages may be displayed over
             the whole width of the screen.

Related Solutions

Make diff Use Full Terminal Width in Side-by-Side Mode

$ alias diff='diff -W $(( $(tput cols) - 2 ))'

ought to do it. You'll want to add it to ~/.bashrc as well.

The - 2 is mainly paranoia, in case something (embedded double-width Unicode?) expands enough to make the line wrap; if you want, you can just use

$ alias diff='diff -W $(tput cols)'

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

Make diff Use Full Terminal Width in Side-by-Side Mode

Dynamically reformatting man pages on terminal dimension changes

Related Question