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.
.*
entry did the trick! i originally had these rules in there, they were added by default except for the youtube rules:
imgur\.com
giphy\.com
imgs\.xkcd\.com
reactiongifs\.com
githubusercontent\.com
youtube\.com
yt.\be
also oooh the missing feature sounds very handy!
.png
or .jpg
or whatever, we _should_ just render that as an image and not expect users to wrap it in Markdown image links 
.*
entry to allow all/any domsins. Screenshot attached 
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=
https://blog.val.town/vibe-code
https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b
https://www.catherinejue.com/fast
The README should hopefully provide a crude introduction. The example configuration file is documented fairly well, I believe (but maybe not). You probably still have to consult and maybe also modify the source code to fit your needs.
Let me know if you run into issues, have questions, wishes etc.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-07-29/awdah-hathaleen-killed-no-other-land-palestinian-activist-israeli-settler
Doesn't sound bad, I like it. The synth reminded me of some song by Beast in Black.
"Anteprojeto passa a determinar que o trabalho flexível, para pais com filhos com menos de 12 anos, terá em conta trabalho prestado “habitualmente” aos fins de semana ou feriados. Alteração contraria decisão do Supremo."
https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/emprego/lei-laboral/detalhe/governo-quer-impedir-que-pais-recusem-trabalho-ao-fim-de-semana
#ptpol #trabalho
“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/
HTML output is a bit broken in GNU groff, though (OpenBSD on the left, GNU on the right):
https://movq.de/v/f1898e648f/s.png
🤔
Still, I’m inclined to convert my manpages to mandoc.

The outlook is poor, rain all the way until maybe the last day of summer camp. Definitely bringing my gummies, they are well needed, the weather report announces several days with up to 14 liters per square meter.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000qw60/executive
https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/
429: Too Many Requests
on my GitHub hosted images, breaking my tutorials etc... *Not good!*July will be gone and my escape to Codeberg.org has not even started (I have to finish my PhD...)
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/
This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.
That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.
*Today*, sandboxing is a thing. *Today*, this matters.
I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t *want* to do it:
> Why not extend the X server?
>
> Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.
But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.
All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)
https://github.com/villares/Paper-objects-with-Processing-and-Python/
(Mind you that GitHub images are mostly failing to load here today for some unknown reason)
If you like this, support my work:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5B4MZ78C9J724
https://liberapay.com/Villares
https://wise.com/pay/me/alexandrev562
#Processing #CreativeCoding
I could be super wrong though lol. Idk shit about anything ^^"