Linux Viewing Man Pages Via Various Methods

So, viewing Linux Manual Pages is an integral activity that we often perform. But the important part is, we want it to get access from anywhere in the system. Simply, because of convenience to find out the exact details we are sought after.

In this post, I am going to show you various ways I personally access those man pages in my system. You might like it and if any of them suits your workflow might adapt it.

Accessing Linux Manual Pages Via Window Manager And Associated Tools

This is a biggie, and it needs more than one tool to accomplish the job. In crux, the integration helps to see manual pages via dmenu and shows up with a pdf viewer.

First I needed to curate a little script and I wrote it in bash¹ (you can use whatever language you are comfortable with) and it is essentially a borrowed idea, so I adopted it.

Here is the little script :

#!/usr/bin/env bash

man -k .  | dmenu -l 30 | gawk '{print $1}' | xargs -r man -Tpdf | zathura - &

You see, I am sitting on I3 Window Manager² and using dmenu³ as a command launcher, and then using all the basic UNIX commands, and finally using zathura⁴ as pdf viewer.

I have a bind in the window Maker configuration file(i.e. i3 config file) like this :

bhaskar_13:13:50_Fri Apr 12: :~>grep manual .ithreeconfig | head -2
# Open manual page as pdf
bindsym $mod+grave exec manual_view_in_pdf

The grave sign is on the same key where the tilde sign is i.e. from the top second-row leftmost key on the QWERTY keyboard.

And I don’t have to stretch much of my finger to use this key bind. YMMV.

From The Terminal aka Command Line And With The Help Of FZF⁵

I have a small snippet in my .bashrc file which allows me to search and see the Linux Manual page on the terminal itself.

Here is the code :

bhaskar_13:19:36_Fri Apr 12: :~>declare -f tm
tm ()
{
    local man_page;
    man_page=$(man -k . | sort | fzf --prompt='Man Pages> ' --preview='echo {} | awk "{print \$1}" | xargs man' --preview-window=right:60%:wrap);
    man "$(echo "$man_page" | awk '{print $1}')"
}

See! Nothing much. When I invoke tm on the command line, it shows like this :

Accessing Linux Manual Pages Via Vim⁶

This is again a borrowed idea and because I use Vim extensively, so thought to integrate with it for benefit.

Here is what I have in my .vimrc

bhaskar_13:23:26_Fri Apr 12: :~>grep Man .vimrc
" Man pages with fzf
command! -nargs=? Man call fzf#run(fzf#wrap({'source': 'man -k -s 1 '.shellescape(<q-args>).' | cut -d " " -f 1', 'sink': 'tab Man', 'options': ['--preview', 'MANPAGER=bat MANWIDTH='.(&columns/2-4).' man {}']}))
nnoremap <Leader>m :Man<CR>

As you can see, I have a key bind ;a, and if I invoke that inside Vim, then it will show like this:

Accessing Linux Manual Pages Via Emacs⁷

When I am inside the Emacs environment, then I try to use the wonderful facilities provided by that environment to enhance productivity. Emacs has a way of showing Linux manual pages, and once invoked via key cord or M-x prompt, it shows like this :

Footnotes:

^{1 Bash Shell Reference Manual}

^{2 https://i3wm.org}

^{3 Suckless Dmenu}

^{4  Zathura A PDF Viewer}

^{5 FZF A Command Line Fuzzy Finder}

^{6 Vim A Text Editor}

^{7 GNU Emacs A Text Editor}