How can I make 'man' more gui friendly?

Question

When I type man bash it shows the info in the terminal itself.

How do I tell "man" to open up the info in gedit instead? Is this possible?

Answer 1

Use this function in .bashrc:

man () { yelp "man:$@"; }

Source

Answer 2

Simply enter the following in the terminal:

man bash >/tmp/t;gedit /tmp/t

That will create a temporary file with the contents of the man page and open it with gedit.

Answer 3

Better yet, have man format it in HTML and open it in firefox

#!/bin/bash
# open a man page in firefox

# loop through all parameters in order
until [ -z $1 ]
do
    # if the manpage was found, spawn it in a browser window
    man -f $1 > /dev/null && coproc man --html=firefox $1
    # go to next parameter
    shift
done

Answer 4

If you don't want to use a shell: hit alt+f2 and enter yelp man:bash. A command history is also available, and you can choose any manpage by replacing man:bash with the manpage you need.

Answer 5

As well as opening the man page in gedit (like the other answers have demonstrated), you can also make a pdf of the man page (as first noted in this article) and then display it in evince. (You need ps2pdf and evince installed). The pdf file is created in your present working directory and is retained after evince is closed.

Simply modify the command below according to the man page that you want and change the file names or else the resulting pdf files will be overwritten. Here is an example for dpkg:

man -t dpkg | ps2pdf - dpkg.pdf && evince dpkg.pdf

However, it is probably much more useful to construct a function. You could add the following function to your .bashrc or .bash_aliases (assuming you have evince and ps2pdf installed; the latter is in the ghostscript package):

mikman() { man -t "$1" | ps2pdf - "$1".pdf && setsid evince "$1".pdf; }

After adding the function, you have to run . .bashrc (or . .bash_aliases) to source your configuration files, or restart the terminal for it to take effect.

Call the function with the name of any program that has a manpage, such as mikman dpkg, and it will carry out the commands and launch the manpage as a pdf. Launching the manpage as a pdf in your pdf reader gives you a very useful gui wherein search tools and the like can be utilised.

Answer 6

On a case-by-case basis you can do:

man mount > mount.txt

The .txt file will be in your current directory.

man mount > mount.txt && gedit mount.txt

will open the file in gedit.

Answer 7

This will create a temporary file with the manual page for bash in your home directory entitled "man" and open it with gedit. As soon as you close gedit the file will be erased too. Just replace bash with whatever man page you want to open.

man bash >> ~/man && gedit ~/man && rm ~/man

Hope this helps :)