colored manpages

Posted by Nico Golde in
Sunday, June 24. 2007

Last Friday we had a small but pretty cool linux event at University. There was also a presentation about grml and when Valentin showed that the manuals on grml are in color there were alot of people saying "wow I want that too"

grml includes this feature since version 0.1 (thanks to Matthias Kopfermann who brought this up and had the initial idea) but alot of people don't know how that works (without using most as PAGER, most has some disadvantages over less).

So here is how it works:

colored manpage

$ mkdir ~/.terminfo/ && cd ~/.terminfo
Now get the terminfo description:
$ wget http://nion.modprobe.de/mostlike.txt
Now compile it using tic (the terminfo entry-description compiler)
$ tic mostlike.txt
(you may want to delete the mostlike.txt file after compiling)

And then just define an alias in the rc file of your favorite shell.
alias man="TERMINFO=~/.terminfo/ LESS=C TERM=mostlike PAGER=less man"

That's it!

If you want to modify the terminfo file, use infocmp mostlike to get the content of it later.

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Defined tags for this entry: cli, config, debian, documentation, grml, linux, setup, shell, software, text mode

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Manpages ???
Manpages ???????? Linux ???????????? man ???????? Manpages ??????Nico Golde ?????????????????????? Manpages ??????????...

Weblog: LinuxTOY
Tracked: Jun 24, 15:44

less colors for man pages
I recently wrote how to use terminfo to get colored manpages. Today ft came up with a nice undocumented feature of less which enables you to set termcap colors by environment variables. Just use export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCA

Weblog: nion's blog
Tracked: Jul 02, 18:15

Comments

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Shouldn't it say:

alias man="TERMINFO=~/.terminfo/ LESS=C TERM=mostlike PAGER=less man"

(mind the last word "man" in the alias ...)

#1 hoeha on 2007-06-24 14:20 (Reply)

yep thanks somehow cut this

#2 nion on 2007-06-24 15:11 (Reply)

Or just install most

Set your default PAGER to most to always use it. update-alternatives --config pager under Debian.

Cheers!

#3 Mike (Homepage) on 2007-06-24 15:18 (Reply)

arg "...but alot of people don't know how that works (without using most as PAGER)..."

#4 nion on 2007-06-24 19:38 (Reply)

Option number two:

# apt-get install most
# update-alternatives --config pager

#5 arne (Homepage) on 2007-06-24 22:09 (Reply)

looks like you guys can't read

#6 nion on 2007-06-24 22:16 (Reply)

Thank you, it worked like a charm on a Mac.

#7 Wey on 2009-06-16 09:04 (Reply)

Easy to follow manual

Thanks a lot, now man pages are probably a bit easier to read.

#8 Stefan Koch (Homepage) on 2009-10-31 20:17 (Reply)

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