On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 11:06:15 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > manpages are not meant to be primarily just read from paper. manpages
> > must be searchable by a proverbial "desperate sysadmin at 3am". E.g.,
> > today I couldn't immediately find an instance of "overflow" in a man
> > page b/c it was hyphenated. Hyphenation is destructive in this
> > circumstances.
>
> echo '.if n .nr HY 0' >> /etc/groff/man.local
> echo '.if n .nr HY 0' >> /etc/groff/mdoc.local
Customizations work for "pet" systems, like a personal laptop. In the
modern world full of "cattle" cloud/incus/docker instances customizing
each of them is an extra errand you'd need to do repeatedly.
Orthogonal to that, I also take issue with the implicit assumption in
that ".if n". One side project I kinda have been pondering from time
to time is something like xman(1) but with Xft and user-selectable
fonts. But I don't have nearly enough tuits, alas. PDF is a bit
awkward, but fills that niche when I want to read a larger man page.
Anyway, be that PDF or my vaporware xftman, the search problem is
exactly the same as with the man(1) in a terminal (".if n"). Yes,
that scenario is more of a "pet" system scenario, so customization
will not be a problem.
-uwe
