Hi Paul, Theo de Raadt wrote on Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 04:17:14PM -0600: > piroft@ wrote:
>> Is there any reason why manpage text does not resize nicely >> with <80 columns xterms? I want to avoid excessive magic. By the way, actually, the default width is 78, not 80. By tradition. >> Is it because of less(1)? No. less(1) always wraps and re-wraps its input file to fit the terminal width. Of course, it preserves existing line breaks, it only adds new ones, and it adds the new ones after the last character that fits on each line, possibly in the middle of words and numbers. > Can I do anything to fix this? Yes. When you want a manpage to exactly fill the available terminal width, you can use an alias like this: $ alias wman='man -Owidth=$COLUMNS' # or $ alias wman='man -Owidth=$((COLUMNS-2))' Of course, if you change the terminal width while man(1) is open, you will have to do: q Ctrl-p <enter> to reformat. I do *NOT* want to add SIGWINCH signal handling to man(1) to abort less(1), reformat, and respawn less(1) in that case. That kind of magic would be over the top, and SIGWINCH is an abomination in the first place. If you are in the habit of always using 65-column terminals on a given machine, this is another option: # echo output width 64 >> /etc/man.conf I *could* maybe teach man(1) to honour $COLUMN by default when starting up in interactive mode, but i did not do so for the following reasons: * Many people are using terminals wider than 80 columns, but texts get hard to read when much wider than that. Very long lines become hard to follow. (That's why newspapers usually have columns of even less than 80 characters, but they don't have as much indentation as manual pages either.) * Nowadays, i guess that terminals narrower than 80 columns have become seriously rare, so there is not very widespread benefit for that case. * Even if someone does use a narrower terminal, formatting will be somewhat poor with the matching -Owidth. Some text, in particular literal displays, will still overflow and wrap in less(1), and text with large indentations will become ridiculously narrow. One thing jmc@ does is trying to make sure that pages do not only read well, but also look visually nice, and much of that work is optimized for the default -Owidth=78. So even for narrower terminals, i'd rather leave the decision to the user. * Setting up an alias as explained above is quite easy. What i could maybe do is recognize "-Owidth=auto" and "output width auto" in man.conf(5) and use $COLUMNS in that case, but even that would require some additional code, and so far, i didn't notice much demand. > It is pre-formatted. Only in the sense than man(1) completes the formatting before it forks and executes less(1). Only the manual pages of 25 (out of 9900) ports are still preformatted at port build time, and none in the base system and Xenocara are preformatted at system build time. Yours, Ingo
