Which .conf file do I need to edit in order to view man pages in a web browser? I'd like to use Google Chrome to do this.
Is this possible?
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4 Answers
One way to do this is to put the following command in ~/.profile:
export PAGER="col -b | open -a /Applications/Safari.app -f"
The PAGER environmental variable controls what program man uses to display man pages. the col command removes all of the backspace-formatting from the man page. The open command saves the output as a temporary text file and opens it with Safari.app.
Or you can edit the PAGER variable in /private/etc/man.conf. You could also probably edit the NROFF variable and eliminate the need to use col -b. See the man page for man.conf.
answered May 20, 2011 at 20:19
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2Thanks Nathan. That does the trick perfectly. I've just altered the line to read:
export PAGER="col -b | open -a /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app -f"so it'll open in Chrome instead of Safari.– boehjMay 21, 2011 at 0:35 -
2I'd been wanting to do this for myself anyway, and I'm glad I finally found time to look into it. I used TextWrangler with the command
/usr/bin/edit --view-top --clean -t "Man page"May 21, 2011 at 1:13
http://www.bruji.com/bwana/ is exactly what you're looking for.
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Cheers. That does look interesting, esp. "We just threw in some color, some bold headers and cleaned it up a bit, so they go easy on the eye." I wonder if I can get such functionality from further editing a .conf file?– boehjMay 21, 2011 at 2:12
You can add a function to your ~/.bash_profile:
function gman () {
man "$1" | col -b > "/tmp/$1"
open -a "/Applications/Google Chrome.app" "/tmp/$1"
}
Similar to the solution by graham, but opening the HTML version in the browser:
function htman {
groff -Thtml -mandoc -c $(man --path $1) > /tmp/$1.html
open /tmp/$1.html
}
(Use >! instead of > for zsh to allow overwriting of the file.)
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I have not seen zsh fail to overwrite pre-existing files when I forget to type
>>instead of>– WGroleauMar 6, 2022 at 18:18 -
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