Finding and Formatting Man Pages ​

WoMan provides three user interfaces for finding and formatting man pages:

  • a topic interface similar to that provided by the standard Emacs man command;
  • a family of filename interfaces analogous to the standard Emacs view-file command;
  • an automatic interface that detects the file type from its contents. (This is currently neither well tested, well supported nor recommended!)

The topic and filename interfaces support completion in the usual way.

The topic interface is generally the most convenient for regular use, although it may require some special setup, especially if your machine does not already have a conventional man installation (which WoMan tries to detect).

The simplest filename interface command woman-find-file can always be used with no setup at all (provided WoMan is installed and loaded or set up to autoload).

The automatic interface always requires special setup.

Case-Dependence of Filenames ​

By default, WoMan ignores case in file pathnames only when it seems appropriate. Microsoft Windows users who want complete case independence should set the special NTEmacs variable w32-downcase-file-names to t and use all lower case when setting WoMan file paths.