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.

Comments (8) - Trackbacks (2)

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

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

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

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

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)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. You can use [geshi lang=lang_name [,ln={y\|n}]][/geshi] tags to embed source code snippets. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: You can use [geshi lang=lang_name [,ln={y\|n}]][/geshi] tags to embed source code snippets.
	Remember Information?