2
Are there any tricks/sites/methods to use the linux man command in a more convenient way ? I love commands in terminal but for some strange reason I preferred to type man in firefox then in the terminal. The output is so long and I have to scroll forever to find what I need. Also the lack of example is a headache.
danidacar
Posted 2010-11-20T19:01:58.270
Reputation: 4 783
2
Assuming your man pager is less, you can search for regexes by using /. For example, to search for examples in man find, type /^examples. You can use page-up and page-down and other usual navigation keys to move around.
Paused until further notice.
Posted 2010-11-20T19:01:58.270
Reputation: 86 075
Also, to repeat the search use n; N to do the same in the reverse direction. – cYrus – 2010-11-20T19:25:56.243
1Yep. More or less any pager you'll find these days has a search command, so learn to use it. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten – 2010-11-20T19:40:15.083
1
I guess you need:
man man
Thevs
Posted 2010-11-20T19:01:58.270
Reputation: 111
Actually man less is more likely to be relevant. Or typing h in less. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' – 2010-11-20T23:39:53.800
1
You can try xman which is a GUI man page viewer on almost all systems. Others must exist as well.
Some Linux distros still keep info pages, which are a hypertext sort of replacement for man pages. It never got much traction, so not all commands have info pages. I never liked them personally but you may like them. Look at the info, pinfo or even tkinfo commands.
Remember that man uses nroff underneath (groff on Linux) and it can target a small subset of output types. I find postscript output useful, either with ghostview/kghostview on screen, or just dumping to a printer. I think the -t flag in most distros will dump to postscript. Or maybe the sequence -p -Tps.
Rich Homolka
Posted 2010-11-20T19:01:58.270
Reputation: 27 121
1
Try installing man2html. This will allow you to browse the man pages in Firefox or whatever browser you want to use.
BillThor
Posted 2010-11-20T19:01:58.270
Reputation: 9 384
An alternative to the more proper responses might be to create a custom search word in Firefox for "man" and point it to Linux Man Pages. Then you can type man <thing> in Firefox and have it work. Still, it's worth getting used to man itself.
– Jamie Schembri – 2010-11-20T19:46:46.967