graphical user interface to view man page?

Question

Are there any tools to view man pages in a gui? I personally dislike the command line interface. It lacks easy scrolling, searching and so on. Is there any tool with some more intuitive user interface and features?

Preferably for KDE.

Answer 1

Gman

From the Ubuntu man page, Gman is a "GTK+ based front-end for man, a good replacement for xman."

Gman provides a simple index of the man pages installed on your local system and offers several options for viewing the man pages. The default option is to have gman open the pages in xterm, but this can be modified to suit your taste.

The other viewing options available are:

• ghostview
• Evince
• LocalBrowse
• NetBrowse

The last two options require having the man2html package installed and will bring up the man pages in your browser.

Answer 2

In KDE we can search and display Unix manpages from the KDE Help Center or we can open and display the content of any locally stored manpage with Ark.

According to the Debian FHS user program manpages are .gz compressed and stored in /usr/share/man/man1 or /usr/local/share/man/man1, but there are more manpages stored in various subdirectories of /usr/share/man, named after the corresponding application name. This should also include manpages from installed applications not available through the Ubuntu repositories (e.g. installed manually or through a ppa).

In GNOME we may browse to the corresponding /usr/share/man subdirectory to open the manpage with file-roller and gedit.

By performing a custom search on Manpages Ubuntu only manpages of applications available from the official repositories will be found.

To edit manpages also see:

• How to create a manpage?

Answer 3

If you are willing to use your browser, you can visit The Ubuntu Manpage Repository. Here's a quote from that page:

Welcome to the Ubuntu Manpage Repository This site contains hundreds of thousands of dynamically generated manuals, extracted from every package of every supported version of Ubuntu, and updated on a daily basis. Traditionally, manpages are browsed on the command line. This project renders all such manuals included in Ubuntu into an HTML, web-browsable format.

Answer 4

KDE Helpcenter

KDE Menu > Applications > Help > Unix manual pages

Quick launch

By the khelpcenter help

:~$ khelpcenter --help
Usage: khelpcenter [Qt-options] [KDE-options] [url] 

The KDE Help Center

Generic options:
  --help                    Show help about options
  --help-qt                 Show Qt specific options
  --help-kde                Show KDE specific options
  --help-all                Show all options
  --author                  Show author information
  -v, --version             Show version information
  --license                 Show license information
  --                        End of options

Arguments:
  url                       URL to display

Command: khelpcenter man:apt will show the apt man page via the KDE help center.

With the quick launcher /1/ Mangonel:

The Mangonel is available from the Ubuntu repositories: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=mangonel&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all

KDE kio-man

KDE Help center > Kioslaves > man

Using the man ioslave you are able to read the man pages installed on your system. It is easy to use...

As with any other KDE ioslave, it is possible to enter a URL, like man:/socket in any KDE application.

With the Konqueror - "man:apt"

Other browsers - The KDE System Settings > File Assosiations > html.

How good or bad the parsing of the kio-man html output is depending the picked browser.

The browser can be launched from the KRunner /1/.

The Kubuntu Forums has a topic: 'Graphical man page viewer' /2/ in the How To's section.

Links

1. KDE Launchers: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?59851-KDE-Application-Launchers
2. http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?62631-Graphical-man-page-viewer

Answer 5

So out of all this answer I usually use this way, when I need to refer any manual.

man ls>/tmp/ls.txt && gedit /tmp/ls.txt

instead of gedit use any text editor.

Answer 6

man pages have been around for many years before you had a graphical desktop environment. They are CLI native man pages for CLI apps.

There would be no reason to view them graphically when they are man pages for a CLI command to begin with.

You could use Gman but I don't personally see the point.

Answer 7

If You know emacs -- it has a woman command, where You should type in the page You'd like to read. woman has a top level menu and You there can, in particular, generate clickable ToC.