Mann pages

Submitted by John on Tue, 2007-10-09 13:22

For a long time I've just used the man command to look up man pages inside Terminal. I find this frustrating. I downloaded a copy of ManOpen years ago but for whatever reason I don't use it. Mostly because I have to resize the window every time. Anyway, fast forward to today when I resolved to spend 10 minutes solving this problem. Here's my solution.

1. Download Bwana and drag it to your OS X Applications folder.
2. Add the following line to your /Users/username/.profile file:

mann() { open man:$@; }

This adds a bash function named mann that opens the man page in Safari, complete with hyperlinks and searchability. So now I can type, e.g., mann lookupd. Yay! And it has the following bonus: whenever I look up a unix command, I now think of Boris.

Topic: 
Mac OS X

Comments

Submitted by Richard Sheppard (not verified) on Fri, 2008-02-01 00:40.

Every so often I remember that I have an easier way of looking at man pages because I'd added Bwana to the mix. But when I need a man page, I'm usually in the terminal (duh) and don't think "Ah. Safari. man:".

This makes so much sense. All I need to do I remember to add the extra "n" now.

Cheers!