@b0rk Not replace, but this script opens in a PDF viewer:

https://www.softwolves.com/wolfblog/2024/11/19/making-man-pages-easier-to-read/

I did write a simple HTML man page render back at university (1997), I wonder if I still have the sources for that...

@b0rk Maybe something like manx? It's for macOS but it is just a bash script so maybe it could be tweaked for other platforms.

https://github.com/jakshin/manx

@b0rk https://github.com/filiparag/wikiman
or I also use Television for fuzzy finding and then opening the pages in bat with man.

https://alexpasmantier.github.io/television/

qman looks interesting but on my machine it takes several seconds to start https://github.com/plp13/qman

@b0rk batman from bat ?

@b0rk I guess there's gnu's `info`... And of course each `man` implementation is different; I'm partial to openbsd's, but it is the antithesis of fancy.

@b0rk there are too many to list. `yelp` (Gnome Help) comes to mind. `tldr` is a different approach. Then there are "smart" terminals, integrations, and a host of other things all trying to help us execute commands properly.

@b0rk I use man with MANPAGER set to `less -ic --use-color -Dd+g -Duc`. Not super fancy, but has a few colors.

@b0rk Ugggggh if you find a good answer, please repost it with a bright red light. I think the biggest issue is that the roff format is too bankrupt, and we need better linking primitives, but… I might just be jaded.

@b0rk related but maybe outside of the scope of your question: I have tried to fire woman (mode from emacs) once. But it wasn't as straightforward as thought and I didn't dig further. As I spent more and more time in emacs, I used woman directly and had less need to implement the "trick".

The reason, because there is one except for using emacs itself 😉 is to have the ability to see and navigate the page with a menu and perform search, and filters with tools like Occur that I'm familiar with.

@b0rk I've been using tldr pages instead of man recently: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr-python-client?tab=readme-ov-file

Works pretty well and looks nice!

@b0rk there's a script to use bat for man pages (aptly called batman) https://github.com/eth-p/bat-extras, for syntax highlighting and some other stuff

@b0rk have routinely lamented the fact that there isn't a version called woman

@b0rk man $1 | lolcat

Fancy ✨️

@b0rk You can read them with bat using batman. Only mildy fancy, though.

@b0rk There is Dash.app for MacOS, which natively supports man-pages (and more API documentation and cheat-sheets).

@b0rk May be some stuff worth trying here: https://alternativeto.net/software/linux-man-pages/ (Full disclosure--just found the article--I haven't tried the alternatives.)

@b0rk neovim https://neovim.io/doc/user/filetype.html#_man

@b0rk Does Emacs count?

@b0rk There used to be pman (symlink to the lynx-based info viewer pinfo) back in the day.

@b0rk what would fancy look like? There's a manpage browser in Emacs which IIRC does hyperlinking, but that is as fancy as I've seen it get