man Command – How to Open Multiple Man Pages in less

lessman

I've noticed that when running man command1 command2, the behavior is: first the man page for command1 is formatted and displayed in less, and then after that less instance exits (e.g. by pressing q), the man page for command2 is formatted and displayed in a new instance of less.

How can I get multiple man pages displayed within the same instance of less?

less has many features only applicable when multiple files are open, such as multi-file search, cross-file "marks" for positions, and others.

Best Answer

Okay, I've worked out the answer:

mman() { LESSOPEN='|man %s' less -is "$@"; }

After running this function definition, running, for example:

mman postfix postqueue postsuper

will open all three man pages in the less pager, each as separate files, accessible with :n and :p and cross-file searching, etc.

If you wish to read up on how this works, I suggest LESS='+/^INPUT PREPROCESSOR' man less as a good place to start. :)

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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.

Unix Man Pages – Why Do Unix Man Pages Use Double Backticks Instead of Double Quotes?

The semantics and the usual glyphs for these characters have changed (several times) during the last 50 years.

The six-bit predecessors of ASCII contained various multi-purpose characters, including one single quote-like character, which was used for anything that had some similarity with a quote: opening quote, closing quote, apostrophe, or (by overprinting) acute or grave accent.

ASCII introduced one more quote-like character, so that now we had ', which was used as apostrophe, closing quote, and acute accent, and `, which was used as opening quote or grave accent (the concrete glyphs differed in various fonts).

For some bizarre reason, ISO-8859-1 declared ' to be an apostrophe or undirected quote, declared ` to be a grave accent, added one more accent ´ (acute accent), and abolished overprinting (so that the isolated accent marks were now completely pointless). Later extensions (MS-Windows codepages and Unicode) fixed this by introducing new directed quote characters and combining accents.

What you see here is essentially a relict from ASCII times, when most fonts had paired (slanted and/or curly) glyphs for ' and `.

Best Answer

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Dynamically reformatting man pages on terminal dimension changes

Unix Man Pages – Why Do Unix Man Pages Use Double Backticks Instead of Double Quotes?

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