WoMan: Browse Unix Manual Pages “W.O. (without) Man”

As distributed with Emacs 31.1.

Francis J. Wright
School of Mathematical Sciences
Queen Mary and Westfield College (University of London)
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK

This file documents WoMan: A program to browse Unix manual pages “W.O. (without) man”.

Copyright © 2001–2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover Texts being “A GNU Manual,” and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”

(a) The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is: “You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.”

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction

• 2 Background

• 3 Finding and Formatting Man Pages

  • 3.1 Topic Interface

    • 3.1.1 The WoMan Topic Cache
    • 3.1.2 Using the "Word at Point" as a Topic Suggestion

  • 3.2 Filename Interface

  • 3.3 Automatic Interface

• 4 Browsing Man Pages

  • 4.1 Fonts and Faces
  • 4.2 Navigation
  • 4.3 Following References
  • 4.4 Changing the Current Man Page
  • 4.5 Convenience Key Bindings
  • 4.6 Imenu Support; Contents Menu

• 5 Customization

  • 5.1 Interface Options
  • 5.2 Formatting Options
  • 5.3 Faces
  • 5.4 Special symbols

• 6 The *WoMan-Log* Buffer

• 7 Technical Details

• 8 Reporting Bugs

• 9 Acknowledgments

• Appendix A GNU Free Documentation License

• Command Index

• Variable Index

• Keystroke Index

• Concept Index