Friday, May 26, 2006

Firefox and Manpages

I prefer to read manpages in a web browser rather than in a terminal or a text editor. Konqueror formats manpages very nicely [screenshots here], but I use Firefox, and do not use KDE.

I wish there were a Firefox extension to handle manpages in a similar way to Konqueror. Instead, I use man2html. I setup a Smart Keyword so that typing man firefox for example retrieves the manpage for Firefox.

Unfortunately I feel its output is not as pleasing as Konqueror's. As a stopgap measure, I use the Greasemonkey Firefox extension to add some CSS to make the pages more to my liking.

  • script.js: Greasemonkey script that activates every time man2html is invoked on localhost. Adds a CSS file to the page.
  • man2html.css: CSS file that changes the look of the manpages.

3 comments:

Alan Clements said...

Found your post while looking for data on man2html. While your system works it would seem easier to just add a print statement to include the line the man2html source file.

odomok said...

print works, but it would be annoying to repatch the source at every update, or maintain a forked package (.deb?) file..

I managed another way. In Apache:

Header set LINK "; REL=stylesheet;"

With your CSS file it looks really nice.

There is a downside, that it does not work with all browsers. Tested: [firefox->working] [chromium->not working]

odomok said...

That would be:
<LocationMatch "/cgi-bin/man/man2html*">
     Header set LINK "</man2html.css>; REL=stylesheet;"
</LocationMatch>