File: man.el.html

This code provides a function, man, with which you can browse UNIX manual pages. Formatting is done in background so that you can continue to use your Emacs while processing is going on.

The mode also supports hypertext-like following of manual page SEE ALSO references, and other features. See below or do ? in a manual page buffer for details.

========== Credits and History ==========
In mid 1991, several people posted some interesting improvements to man.el from the standard Emacs 18.57 distribution. I liked many of these, but wanted everything in one single package, so I decided to incorporate them into a single manual browsing mode. While much of the code here has been rewritten, and some features added, these folks deserve lots of credit for providing the initial excellent packages on which this one is based.

Nick Duffek <duffek@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu>, posted a very nice improvement which retrieved and cleaned the manpages in a background process, and which correctly deciphered such options as man -k.

Eric Rose <erose@jessica.stanford.edu>, submitted manual.el which provided a very nice manual browsing mode.

This package was available as superman.el from the LCD package for some time before it was accepted into Emacs 19. The entry point and some other names have been changed to make it a drop-in replacement for the old man.el package.

Francesco Potortì <pot@cnuce.cnr.it> cleaned it up thoroughly, making it faster, more robust and more tolerant of different systems' man idiosyncrasies.

========== Features ==========
+ Runs "man" in the background and pipes the results through a
  series of sed and awk scripts so that all retrieving and cleaning
  is done in the background. The cleaning commands are configurable.
+ Syntax is the same as Un*x man
+ Functionality is the same as Un*x man, including "man -k" and
  "man <section>", etc.
+ Provides a manual browsing mode with keybindings for traversing
  the sections of a manpage, following references in the SEE ALSO
  section, and more.
+ Multiple manpages created with the same man command are put into
  a narrowed buffer circular list.

============= TODO ===========
- Add a command for printing.
- The awk script deletes multiple blank lines. This behavior does
  not allow one to understand if there was indeed a blank line at the
  end or beginning of a page (after the header, or before the
  footer). A different algorithm should be used. It is easy to
  compute how many blank lines there are before and after the page
  headers, and after the page footer. But it is possible to compute
  the number of blank lines before the page footer by heuristics
  only. Is it worth doing?
- Allow a user option to mean that all the manpages should go in
  the same buffer, where they can be browsed with M-n and M-p.

Defined variables (57)

Defined functions (53)

Defined faces (3)