Ryan Tomayko

man.cx —

This is probably the nicest manpage site I’ve come across:

I haven’t heard of it. They imported 98,660 manpages from all available Debian packages plus some from other sources. The type is clean. URLs are short and sweet. Manual sections are presented in a nice TOC on the left. They have some other novel features like comments on each manpage.

I planned to do something very similar. I even registered mancutter.org. A great number of manpages are distributed under a liberal license. I wanted to throw up a nice and simple site and then ship a tool anyone could run to bomb roff up to the server for all manpages on a machine. You should be able to gather all Linux and BSD manpages fairly quickly with such a system. Or, you could push up a specific set of manpages so project maintainers could publish directly to the site. I might still but man.cx is a huge chunk of what I was looking for.

man what —

Chris Wanstrath makes the case for UNIX man pages and tours through a bunch of tools for creating, finding, and reading them.

gem-man(1) -- view a gem's man page —

Perfect. This was a huge piece missing from Ron and I had no clue how to address it. Chris’s gem extension adds a gem man command that brings up the man page for any gem and works with any gem that includes normal roff man pages.

Debian/Ruby Extras - Dear Upstream Developers —

Tips for Ruby project maintainers on increasing the changes of getting your stuffs packaged for Debian. Most are just good sense. Use setup.rb, don’t explicitly require rubygems in your libraries and tests, use the most portable shebang (#!/usr/bin/env ruby), and provide a man page. Ron can help with that last one.

ron(7) -- the opposite of roff —

I’ve released a tool for authoring UNIX manual pages using a markdown-ish source format:

Ron is a humane text format and toolchain for creating UNIX man pages, and things that appear as man pages from a distance. Use it to build and install standard UNIX roff man pages or to generate nicely formatted HTML manual pages for the web.

It still needs some work but can produce useful output for both roff and HTML. The sources are on GitHub.

tigrc(5) —

Turns out tig, the ncurses front-end to git, is all kinds of customizable. Quick tip: set the author-width to 5 or less and author names are abbreviated to initials:

$ cat <<E > ~/.tigrc
set show-date = no
set author-width=3
E
$ tig
RT harmful specs - disable them
KN [defunkt/master] I shine the shoes around here
CW don't let daemon serving ruin the public / private flow
CW ensure the listeners are notified, just in case
CW add "open sourced" event
CW Turns out we're still stuck on 1.0
CW let's try this again
CW allow overriding of the queue during job creation

Boom.

Bwana —

Manual page URL handler for Safari (e.g., “man:bash”, “man:sort” in URL box). References to other man pages are hyperlinked very nicely and the pages themselves are formatted quite nicely.

ManPageView —

Vim add-in for viewing manpages, perldoc (both system and embedded), help, info, and php files. Maybe I’ll finally be able to read all that GNU info doc I keep hearing about in the GNU coreutils man pages.