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Is there a way to use gnome-do to launch some man page in the help GUI? Or some other two-click approach I could employ?

I can open help and then use Ctrl+L to open man:find -- can I make that even faster?

2 Answers 2

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yelp man:find

In case the command you wish to find shares its name with a command in a different section, specify which section in parentheses after the command, and enclose the whole argument in quotations to escape read the parentheses literally:

yelp man:printf      # shell command: search defaulted to section 1
yelp 'man:printf(3)' # library call: search for printf in section 3
yelp man:printf(3)   # bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

yelp 'man:exit(2)'   # system calls to terminal process
yelp 'man:exit(3)'   # library call to do the same
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  • Works from the command line but not from gnome-do?
    – Amanda
    Jun 10, 2011 at 21:32
  • Sorry, read your question as gnome-open. My bad. I'll look into it.
    – ladaghini
    Jun 11, 2011 at 4:14
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You can open man pages directly by enabling the aptly-named “Read Manual Pages” plugin. That adds a Read manual page (man) action to Do, which takes the name of the man page you're after as its item to act on.

This plugin is in the "Unofficial Plugins" set. That doesn't mean much, except that you need to select "Unofficial Plugins" from the dropdown before the plugin will show up.

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  • Hmmm. Theoretically, that's exactly what I want. But ... if I want to read the man page for "find" I have to type find, scroll past all the files that have the word find in them to the word way down at the bottom and then tab over to select the man page. yelp
    – Amanda
    Aug 30, 2011 at 20:58
  • 1
    Actually, you can do that much quicker. Rather than typing "find" into the first pane, bring up the "Read manual page (man)" action in the first pane (just typing "read ma" is enough for me here), then the second pane will only contain items that can be acted on by the "Read manual page" action. At the moment, that means just raw text items, and there shouldn't be many of them in your universe :) This could be better if the Man plugin did some indexing of the man pages.
    – RAOF
    Sep 10, 2011 at 18:30

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