Sixteen years into the 21st century I remain baffled that we still have to go out of our way if we want to see a man page
- rendered in a proportional font (that is, not Courier or similar)
- with links to other referenced pages
There are tantalizing web sites with HTML man pages that have links, like this, but I haven't found such a site with pages updated for the current version of macOS. And of course a web site won't show man pages for software you've installed via Homebrew, etc.
Is there a solution to this problem? I've looked and looked. This
function manp {
man -t "$1" | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app/
}
renders a page and shows it in Preview (after you wait for a PostScript interpreter to convert it to PDF), but you don't get live links.
The man page for man says:
HTML PAGES
Man will find HTML pages if they live in directories named as expected to be ".html", thus a valid name for an HTML version of the ls(1) man page would be /usr/share/man/htmlman1/ls.1.html.
I could write a script to convert all of the man pages everywhere on my system to HTML, but I bet someone has already done this. And I bet they have also solved the problem of rendering SEE ALSO references as links, which the man command apparently doesn't do.