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.