On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 01:18:32PM +0100, Joe wrote: > Man pages were written as pure text files, beginning in a period when > that was pretty much all the Web could do. You can read man pages on a > server, which will not usually have any graphic display ability beyond > curses/ncurses.
Man pages are written using a textual markup system called ROFF, which stands for "run off". ROFF dates back to 1971, according to Wikipedia, and has been used for Unix's man pages since the very beginning. You can see the raw ROFF code in any of Debian's man pages. For example, try: zless /usr/share/man/man1/dpkg.1.gz ROFF is much older than "the Web" (by about 20-25 years). It originates from a period when the manuals would have been printed on paper to be read. As such, ROFF's output is text with printer markup (for example, boldface is done by emitting each character twice with a backspace in between the two instances, underlining is done by emitting a backspace and an underscore, and so on). Pagers such as less know how to take printer-markup ROFF output and turn it into terminal escape sequences for boldface, etc. This gives you the ability to read the man pages in a terminal, without having to destroy a bunch of trees. > It is only in the Windows world that server > administrators are expected to need a GUI (and they don't really, most > of them love PowerShell). Amen.
