[Cialug] Color in Man Pages? What's Wrong With You?

[David Champion]

Yeah, Beastie users tend to be high on the curmudgeon scale.

-dc


On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 9:06 AM Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Speaking of the bad ol' days of Linux...
>
> I saw this thing the other day about getting color into manpages.
> Sorta like syntax highlighting, I suppose. "Could be interesting" is
> my response. Here's a different kind of response from Ingo Schwarze,
> maintainer of mandoc:
>
> =========================================================
> > It's a little far afield, but some here might be interested in the
> > interest in manpages.  mdoc has no color features, leaving folks to
> > resort to some pretty brutal techniques.
>
> Huh?  Of course mdoc does have color features.  Just use
>
>   mandoc -Thtml -Ostyle=/some_path/color.css manual.mdoc | lynx -stdin
>
> With the mandoc implementation of man, it shouldn't be difficult
> to set up MANPAGER="lynx -force_html",
> put "output style /some_path/color.css" into man.conf(5), and tell
> the shell "alias man='man -Thtml'".  All of that has been documented
> in the obvious manual pages for years: You could use -Ostyle in the
> alias before the advent of man.conf(5).
> =========================================================
>
> Ah, yes, Remember back when? Real hackers had grey beards and wrote
> their own damned text editors because that's the path of joy. If you
> want color in your manpages, no problem! Grab yourself a text editor
> and source and go to town ya snot-nosed punk.
>
> Full rant here:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2016-08/msg00016.html
>
> To be fair, he was writing on the groff mailing list. Also, he's not a
> Linux user, apparently. His OS's mascot has spikes. = ) But the whole
> thing made me chuckle.
>
> --
> Todd
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