Get tired of trying to read the man page for a program in your terminal? If the window isn’t sized properly you can have some pretty funky formatting issues which can make it a pain to read through your documentation. Fear not, diligent readers, I have a solution and it involves Firefox. Those of you using Konqueror already have the ability to read man pages in your browser.

First you’ll need to install man2html, follow the link to the source code if man2html isn’t offered in the repository for your distribution. You’ll also need apache2, and whatever unmet dependencies (if any) are required. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, just follow these simple steps to making your documentation read a little easier.

• Open Firefox
• Go to ‘Organize Bookmarks‘
• Open any bookmark folder, right-click and go to ‘New Bookmark‘
• Name the bookmark anything you want, I chose ‘Man Pages’
• Put ‘http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html?query=%s‘ into the Location field witout the quotation marks
• Put ‘man‘ into the Keyword field without the quotations
• Click Add

For those who enjoy visual aids, we’ve got a series of screenshots to walk you through the process, enjoy.

That’s it, there’s nothing more to it. Now all you have to do to view a man page in HTML is open Firefox, type man name_of_program, and hit Enter and you’re looking at your man page is a much easier to read format. Easy, no? Why not give it a try with man apache2 as Firefox seems to have no man page…oddly enough.

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2 Comments »

1. 
   Devin de Gruyl
   June 10, 2008 at 12:40 am

   Now the question becomes, how can we use this to make Firefox the default manpage viewer? Maybe a shell script…

   [Reply]

   Migo Reply:
   June 10th, 2008 at 12:45 am

   Possibly, I hadn’t given it much thought to be honest with you. I’m not sure how you’d go about it, but I’ll definitely look into it. If for no other reason than I think it’d be cool.

   [Reply]

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