Hi Eric, Chris, and Others, My suggestion for reading man pages for terminal commands is to download the freeware program bwana: http://bruji.com/bwana/
This program lets you use your browser to read man pages, and for the example that Chris cited of reading the man page for "bash", you'd simply navigate to the address bar of Safari with Command-L and type: man:bash When you press "return", the man page for the command you specified will be displayed in your web browser. You can also navigate to linked man page entries within that web page, and activate those links to display and read their man page entries. For the general case, just substitute whichever command you want to query after the colon that you type immediately after the word "man" in the address field. Bwana will let you read man pages in your browser for all versions of Mac OS X back to Tiger, and is a universal binary so it can also be run on the old PowerPC Macs as well as the current Intel Macs. If you want another variant shell command to display man pages in TextEdit instead of Preview, you can use: man bash | col -b | open -f -a TextEdit In the same thread from last month that discussed various ways of displaying man page information, I summarized how you could create definitions for both the above way of piping to "col" to reformat and then opening in TextEdit, and also for the command format that Chris referenced for using Preview. So if you want to set up your own Terminal command definitions for a "pman" or a "tman" command that would display in Preview or TextEdit, you can read my archived post: • Re: terminal: prompt: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg60660.html However, as I stated at the end of that post, it's really easiest to just use bwana instead. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Mar 30, 2012, at 6:26 AM, Chris Blouch wrote: > This was posted previously on the list to load up man pages using Preview: > > man -t bash | open -a preview -f > > Maybe that would do a better job. Of course you would replace bash with > whatever command you actually wanted man pages for. I found it was somewhat > readable with VO but sometimes jumped around a bit. For example, it sometimes > would jump to the footer to read that and then come back up to where I was > reading elsewhere on the page. > > CB > > On 3/30/12 7:17 AM, Eric Oyen wrote: >> is there an easier to get info on a command in terminal. the man pages read, >> but in a broken fashion that makes finding the relevant information >> frustratingly difficult. the page won't read every line when the down arrow >> is depressed. this forces me to interact in word mode to find out what was >> not said. >> >> there has to be another, better way. I have also tried the online html pages >> that are recoded man pages, only to get a similar result (meaning that the >> reading of these pages is not smooth and feels entirely broken). >> >> -eric >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
