Comments on: One Small Step For A Man Page

By: Scott Stevenson

Scott Stevenson — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:08:40 +0000

Perhaps slightly off topic, but I just noticed that Bruji is a gold sponsor for Child’s Play, alongside ATI, Konami, Firefox, and Ubisoft. I’m thinking that’s more than a small amount of money.

For comparison, Blizzard and THQ are in Silver, which is one level down. I don’t mean that it’s competitve, just that Bruji is not only a sponsor, but apparently did a lot more than the minimum. Not bad for a indie Mac developer.

Delicious Monster is a Platinum sponsor, alongside Dell and Sony.

By: Kelan

Kelan — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:20:08 +0000

My friend and I came up with a little trick to view man pages as PDFs, so that you can view it with nice formatting, scroll around, search, etc. Basically, it saves the manpage as a postscript file on your desktop (this could probably be changed to /tmp/ or something) and then opens it with Preview, which converts it from ps to pdf. You can even then save the resulting file and keep the pdf for later use. Its pretty hacky, with the sleep step and all, but it works. I used have have it sleep 10 (seconds) on my old 450G4 tower, but sleep 2 seems to work on my MBP (and Preview reads the whole ps file immediately, so it doesn’t have to finish converting the file before this deletes it). We initially wrote it as a tcsh alias, but recently converted it to a bash function.

Just copy one of the following to your .tcshrc or .profile file (respectively), open a new terminal window, and type “manview curl” (for example).

tcsh:
alias manview 'man -t \!:1 > ~/Desktop/\!:1.ps; open -a Preview.app ~/Desktop/\!:1.ps; sleep 10; rm ~/Desktop/\!:1.ps'

bash:
manview () { if [ "$#" = "1" ]; then man -t ${1} > ~/Desktop/${1}.ps open -a Preview.app ~/Desktop/${1}.ps sleep 10 rm ~/Desktop/${1}.ps fi }

By: Alberto Ricart

Alberto Ricart — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:39:52 +0000

If you add the following to script.strings, you also get OmniWeb compatibility:

OmniWeb
tell application “OmniWeb”
GetURL “file://%@”
end tell

By: Conor

Conor — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 09:51:34 +0000

I am glad you find Bwana useful; thank you for taking the time to make it even more useful. I have included your changes and made it Bwana 2.1. There have been a lot of suggestions for Bwana over the years, but users love the simplicity. I think the most repeated ones are apropos searching and a bezel type display while it builds the HTML for the index or man page.

Nigel: Many users use Quicksilver, LaunchBar or even the command line to trigger Bwana as they prefer the browser display.

By: Nigel Kersten

Nigel Kersten — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 20:14:37 +0000

I’ve used ManOpen for a while, but don’t bother with the commandline tool anymore.

I’ve bound x-man-page://*** as a Quicksilver shortcut called ‘uman’, so I just use QS to trigger all man page views.

Looking at BWana now though… using the browser is a nice idea.

By: Kevin Walzer

Kevin Walzer — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 19:17:10 +0000

Bwana is certainly an interesting application for viewing man pages. ManOpen is also nice if you prefer a more document-based approach, and for browsing man pages on your system.

Good free apps like this make for tough competition for my own app, VuMan. It’s sold a few licenses, but not in the numbers I would have hoped for.

By: Spyro

Spyro — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 19:14:50 +0000

Hmmmm I use ManOpen and its usefull openman commande line tool.
Nice how “open man:foo” works with Bwana (like “openman foo” with ManOpen).

By: Jens Ayton

Jens Ayton — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 19:13:12 +0000

I used Bwana for a while, but I’ve found Xcode’s Help->Open man page… more convenient since I tend to have Xcode running all the time too.