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movq
www.uninformativ.de
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Speaking of manpages:

“Man pages are great, man readers are the problem”

https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/04/09/man-pages-are-great-man-readers-are-the-problem/
kat
yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz
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@movq yeah man pages are good but these days i kinda prefer tldr and especially cheat.sh
lyse
lyse.isobeef.org
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@movq @kat I also wondered for a very long time why nobody improved the man experience in the terminal. I'd love to see links and more colors.
kat
yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz
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@lyse we NEED syntax highlighting in our man pages!!!! (FWIW i think bat can do that lol)
movq
www.uninformativ.de
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@lyse @kat Colorized manpages have been a thing for a very long time:

https://movq.de/v/81219d7f7a/s.png

Problem is, hardly anybody knows this, because you configure this by … drumroll … overwriting TERMCAP entries of less in your ~/.bashrc:

export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[38;5;3m' # Bold
 export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[0m' # End Bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\e[4;38;5;6m' # Underline
 export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\e[0m' # End Underline
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1 # Needed since groff 1.23=
kat
yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz
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@movq WHATTTTT WHY DO THEY MAKE THIS SO HARD
movq
www.uninformativ.de
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@kat On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history) and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but *much* faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

*If* mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.
movq
www.uninformativ.de
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You can explicitly use colors in manpages. I saw this in the apt manpage of Ubuntu recently, which, for some reason, uses blue text in one place:

https://movq.de/v/de5ab72016/s.png

Makes little sense to me. I’m glad that most manpages don’t do this. I wouldn’t want unicorn vomit all over the place.

Using colors can be done using the low level commands \m and \M:

.TH foo_program 3
\m[blue]I'm blue\m[], da ba dee.
\m[red]\M[yellow]I'm red on yellow.\m[]\M[]
This is quite horrible.

https://movq.de/v/394282ec75/s.png