WoMan: Browse Unix Manual Pages “W.O. (without) Man”

3.1 Topic Interface

The topic interface is accessed principally via the command woman. The same command can be accessed via the menu item ‘Help->Manuals->Read Man Page (WoMan)...’ once WoMan has been loaded. The command reads a manual topic in the minibuffer, which can be the basename of a man file anywhere in the man file structure. The “basename” in this context means the filename without any directory component and without any extension or suffix components that relate to the file type. So, for example, if there is a compressed source file in Chapter 5 of the UNIX Programmer’s Manual with the full pathname /usr/local/man/man5/man.conf.5.gz then the topic is man.conf. Provided WoMan is configured correctly, this topic will appear among the completions offered by woman. If more than one file has the same topic name then WoMan will prompt for which file to format. Completion of topics is case insensitive.

Clearly, woman has to know where to look for man files and there are two customizable user options that store this information: woman-manpath and woman-path. See Interface Options. If woman-manpath is not set explicitly then WoMan tries to pick up the information that would be used by the man command, as follows. If the environment variable MANPATH is set, which seems to be the standard mechanism under UNIX, then WoMan parses that. Otherwise, if WoMan can find a configuration file named (by default) man.conf (or something very similar), which seems to be the standard mechanism under GNU/Linux, then it parses that. To be precise, “something very similar” means starting with ‘man’ and ending with ‘.conf’ and possibly more lowercase letters, e.g., manual.configuration. The search path and/or precise full path name for this file are set by the value of the customizable user option woman-man.conf-path. If all else fails, WoMan uses a plausible default man search path.

If the above default configuration does not work correctly for any reason then simply customize the value of woman-manpath. To access man files that are not in a conventional man file hierarchy, customize the value of woman-path to include the directories containing the files. In this way, woman can access manual files anywhere in the entire file system.

There are two differences between woman-manpath and woman-path. Firstly, the elements of woman-manpath must be directories that contain directories of man files, whereas the elements of woman-path must be directories that contain man files directly. Secondly, the last directory component of each element of woman-path is treated as a regular (Emacs) match expression rather than a fixed name, which allows collections of related directories to be specified succinctly. Also, elements of woman-manpath can be conses, indicating a mapping from ‘PATH’ environment variable components to man directory hierarchies.

For topic completion to work, WoMan must build a list of all the manual files that it can access, which can be very slow, especially if a network is involved. For this reason, it caches various amounts of information, after which retrieving it from the cache is very fast. If the cache ever gets out of synchronism with reality, running the woman command with a prefix argument (e.g., C-u M-x woman) will force it to rebuild its cache. This is necessary only if the names or locations of any man files change; it is not necessary if only their contents change. It would always be necessary if such a change occurred whilst Emacs were running and after WoMan has been loaded. It may be necessary if such a change occurs between Emacs sessions and persistent caching is used, although WoMan can detect some changes that invalidate its cache and rebuild it automatically.

Customize the variable woman-cache-filename to save the cache between Emacs sessions. This is recommended only if the woman command is too slow the first time it is run in an Emacs session, while it builds its cache in main memory, which may be very slow. See The WoMan Topic Cache, for further details.

• The WoMan Topic Cache
• Using the "Word at Point" as a Topic Suggestion

(global-set-key "\C-cw"
                (lambda ()
                  (interactive)
                  (let ((woman-use-topic-at-point t))
                    (woman))))

3.2 Filename Interface

The commands in this family are completely independent of the topic interface, caching mechanism, etc.

The filename interface is accessed principally via the extended command woman-find-file, which is available without any configuration at all (provided WoMan is installed and loaded or set up to autoload). This command can be used to browse any accessible man file, regardless of its filename or location. If the file is compressed then automatic file decompression must already be turned on (e.g., see the ‘Help->Options’ submenu)—it is turned on automatically only by the woman topic interface.

Once WoMan is loaded (or if specially set up), various additional commands in this family are available. In a dired buffer, the command woman-dired-find-file allows the file on the same line as point to be formatted and browsed by WoMan. It is bound to the key W in the dired mode map and added to the dired major mode menu. It may also be bound to w, unless this key is bound by another library, which it is by dired-x, for example. Because it is quite likely that other libraries will extend the capabilities of such a commonly used mode as dired, the precise key bindings added by WoMan to the dired mode map are controlled by the user option woman-dired-keys.

When a tar (Tape ARchive) file is visited in Emacs, it is opened in tar mode, which parses the tar file and shows a dired-like view of its contents. The WoMan command woman-tar-extract-file allows the file on the same line as point to be formatted and browsed by WoMan. It is bound to the key w in the tar mode map and added to the tar major mode menu.

The command woman-reformat-last-file, which is bound to the key R in WoMan mode and available on the major mode menu, reformats the last file formatted by WoMan. This may occasionally be useful if formatting parameters, such as the fill column, are changed, or perhaps if the buffer is somehow corrupted.

The command woman-decode-buffer can be used to decode and browse the current buffer if it is visiting a man file, although it is primarily used internally by WoMan.

3.3 Automatic Interface

Emacs provides an interface to detect automatically the format of a file and decode it when it is visited. It is used primarily by the facilities for editing rich (i.e., formatted) text, as a way to store formatting information transparently as ASCII markup. WoMan can in principle use this interface, but it must be configured explicitly.

This use of WoMan does not seem to be particularly advantageous, so it is not really supported. It originated during early experiments on how best to implement WoMan, before I implemented the current topic interface, and I subsequently stopped using it. I might revive it as a mechanism for storing pre-formatted WoMan files, somewhat analogous to the standard Unix catman facility. In the meantime, it exists for anyone who wants to experiment with it. Once it is set up it is simply a question of visiting the file and there is no WoMan-specific user interface!

To use it, put something like this in your .emacs file. [The call to set-visited-file-name is to avoid font-locking triggered by automatic major mode selection.]

(autoload 'woman-decode-region "woman")

(add-to-list 'format-alist
             '(man "Unix man-page source format" "\\.\\(TH\\|ig\\) "
                   woman-decode-region nil nil
                   (lambda (arg)
                     set-visited-file-name
                     (file-name-sans-extension buffer-file-name))))

4.1 Fonts and Faces

Fonts used by roff are handled by WoMan as faces, the details of which are customizable. See Faces. WoMan supports both the italic and bold fonts normally used in man pages, together with a single face to represent all unknown fonts (which are occasionally used in “non-standard” man pages, usually to represent a “typewriter” font) and a face to indicate additional symbols introduced by WoMan. This currently means the characters ^ and _ used to indicate super- and sub-scripts, which are not displayed well by WoMan.

4.2 Navigation

Man (and hence WoMan) mode can be thought of as a superset of view mode. The buffer cannot be edited, so keys that would normally self-insert are used for navigation. The WoMan key bindings are a minor modification of the man key bindings.

SPC ¶

Scroll the man page up the window (scroll-up).

DEL ¶

S-SPC

Scroll the man page down the window (scroll-down).

n ¶

Move point to the Nth next section—default 1 (Man-next-section).

p ¶

Move point to Nth previous section—default 1 (Man-previous-section).

g ¶

Move point to the specified section (Man-goto-section).

s ¶

Move point to the “SEE ALSO” section (Man-goto-see-also-section). Actually the section moved to is described by Man-see-also-regexp.

4.3 Following References

Man pages usually contain a “SEE ALSO” section containing references to other man pages. If these man pages are installed then WoMan can easily be directed to follow the reference, i.e., to find and format the man page. When the mouse is passed over a correctly formatted reference it is highlighted, in which case clicking the middle button mouse-2 will cause WoMan to follow the reference. Alternatively, when point is over such a reference the key RET will follow the reference.

Any word in the buffer can be used as a reference by clicking mouse-2 over it provided the Meta key is also used (although in general such a “reference” will not lead to a man page). Alternatively, the key r allows completion to be used to select a reference to follow, based on the word at point as default.

mouse-2 ¶

Run WoMan with word under mouse as topic (woman-mouse-2). The word must be mouse-highlighted unless woman-mouse-2 is used with the Meta key.

RET ¶

Get the man page for the topic under (or nearest to) point (man-follow).

r ¶

Get one of the man pages referred to in the “SEE ALSO” section (Man-follow-manual-reference). Specify which reference to use; default is based on word at point.

4.4 Changing the Current Man Page

The man page currently being browsed by WoMan can be changed in several ways. The command woman can be invoked to format another man page, or the current WoMan buffer can be buried or killed. WoMan maintains a ring of formatted man pages, and it is possible to move forwards and backwards in this ring by moving to the next or previous man page. It is sometimes useful to reformat the current page, for example after the right margin (the wrap column) or some other formatting parameter has been changed.

Buffers formatted by Man and WoMan are completely unrelated, even though some of the commands to manipulate them are superficially the same (and share code).

m ¶

Run the command man to get a Un*x manual page and put it in a buffer. This command is the top-level command in the man package. It runs a Un*x command to retrieve and clean a man page in the background and places the results in a Man mode (man page browsing) buffer. If a man buffer already exists for this man page, it will display immediately. This works exactly the same if WoMan is loaded, except that the formatting time is displayed in the mini-buffer.

w ¶

Run the command woman exactly as if the extended command or menu item had been used.

q ¶

Bury the buffer containing the current man page (Man-quit), i.e., move it to the bottom of the buffer stack.

k ¶

Kill the buffer containing the current man page (Man-kill), i.e., delete it completely so that it can be retrieved only by formatting the page again.

M-p ¶

Find the previous WoMan buffer (WoMan-previous-manpage).

M-n ¶

Find the next WoMan buffer (WoMan-next-manpage).

R ¶

Call WoMan to reformat the last man page formatted by WoMan (woman-reformat-last-file), e.g., after changing the fill column.

4.5 Convenience Key Bindings

- ¶

Begin a negative numeric argument for the next command (negative-argument).

0 .. 9 ¶

Part of the numeric argument for the next command (digit-argument).

< ¶

.

Move point to the beginning of the buffer; leave mark at previous position (beginning-of-buffer).

> ¶

Move point to the end of the buffer; leave mark at previous position (end-of-buffer).

? ¶

Display documentation of current major mode and minor modes (describe-mode). The major mode description comes first, followed by the minor modes, each on a separate page.

4.6 Imenu Support; Contents Menu

The WoMan menu provides an option to make a contents menu for the current man page (using imenu). Alternatively, if you customize the option woman-imenu to t then WoMan will do it automatically for every man page. The menu title is set by the option woman-imenu-title, which is “CONTENTS” by default. The menu shows manual sections and subsections by default, but you can change this by customizing woman-imenu-generic-expression.

WoMan is configured not to replace spaces in an imenu *Completion* buffer. For further documentation on the use of imenu, such as menu sorting, see the source file imenu.el, which is distributed with GNU Emacs.

5.1 Interface Options

These options control the process of locating the appropriate file to browse, and the appearance of the browsing interface.

woman-man.conf-path ¶

A list of strings representing directories to search and/or files to try for a man configuration file. The default is

("/etc" "/usr/local/lib")

[for GNU/Linux and Cygwin respectively.] A trailing separator (/ for UNIX etc.) on directories is optional and the filename matched if a directory is specified is the first to match the regexp man.*\.conf. If the environment variable MANPATH is not set but a configuration file is found then it is parsed instead (or as well) to provide a default value for woman-manpath.

woman-manpath ¶

A list of strings representing directory trees to search for Unix manual files. Each element should be the name of a directory that contains subdirectories of the form man?, or more precisely subdirectories selected by the value of woman-manpath-man-regexp. Non-directory and unreadable files are ignored. This can also contain conses, with the car indicating a PATH variable component mapped to the directory tree given in the cdr.

If not set then the environment variable MANPATH is used. If no such environment variable is found, the default list is determined by consulting the man configuration file if found. By default this is expected to be either /etc/man.config or /usr/local/lib/man.conf, which is controlled by the user option woman-man.conf-path. An empty substring of MANPATH denotes the default list. Otherwise, the default value of this variable is

("/usr/man" "/usr/local/man")

Any environment variables (names of which must have the Unix-style form $NAME, e.g., $HOME, $EMACSDATA, $EMACS_DIR, regardless of platform) are evaluated first but each element must evaluate to a single name of a directory. Trailing /s are ignored. (Specific directories in woman-path are also searched.)

On Microsoft platforms I recommend including drive letters explicitly, e.g.:

("C:/Cygwin/usr/man" "C:/usr/man" "C:/usr/local/man")

The MANPATH environment variable may be set using DOS semi-colon-separated or Unix-style colon-separated syntax (but not mixed).

woman-manpath-man-regexp ¶

A regular expression to match man directories under the woman-manpath directories. These normally have names of the form man?. Its default value is "[Mm][Aa][Nn]", which is case-insensitive mainly for the benefit of Microsoft platforms. Its purpose is to avoid directories such as cat?, ., .., etc.

woman-path ¶

A list of strings representing specific directories to search for Unix manual files. For example

("/emacs/etc")

These directories are searched in addition to the directory trees specified in woman-manpath. Each element should be a directory string or nil, which represents the current directory when the path is expanded and cached. However, the last component (only) of each directory string is treated as a regexp (Emacs, not shell) and the string is expanded into a list of matching directories. Non-directory and unreadable files are ignored. The default value on MS-DOS is

("$DJDIR/info" "$DJDIR/man/cat[1-9onlp]")

and on other platforms is nil.

Any environment variables (names of which must have the Unix-style form $NAME, e.g., $HOME, $EMACSDATA, $EMACS_DIR, regardless of platform) are evaluated first but each element must evaluate to a single name of a directory (regexp, see above). For example

("$EMACSDATA")

or equivalently

("$EMACS_DIR/etc")

Trailing /s are discarded. (The directory trees in woman-manpath are also searched.) On Microsoft platforms I recommend including drive letters explicitly.

woman-cache-level ¶

A positive integer representing the level of topic caching:

1. cache only the topic and directory lists (uses minimal memory, but not recommended);
2. cache also the directories for each topic (faster, without using much more memory);
3. cache also the actual filenames for each topic (fastest, but uses twice as much memory).

The default value is currently 2, a good general compromise. If the woman command is slow to find files then try 3, which may be particularly beneficial with large remote-mounted man directories. Run the woman command with a prefix argument or delete the cache file woman-cache-filename for a change to take effect. (Values < 1 behave like 1; values > 3 behave like 3.)

woman-cache-filename ¶

Either a string representing the full pathname of the WoMan directory and topic cache file, or nil. It is used to save and restore the cache between Emacs sessions. This is especially useful with remote-mounted man page files! The default value of nil suppresses this action. The “standard” non-nil filename is ~/.wmncach.el. Remember that a prefix argument forces the woman command to update and re-write the cache.

woman-dired-keys ¶

A list of dired mode keys to be defined to run WoMan on the current file, e.g., ("w" "W") or any non-nil atom to automatically define w and W if they are unbound, or nil to do nothing. Default is t.

woman-imenu-generic-expression ¶

Imenu support for Sections and Subsections: an alist with elements of the form (MENU-TITLE REGEXP INDEX)—see the documentation for imenu-generic-expression. Default value is

((nil "\n\\([A-Z].*\\)" 1)  ; SECTION, but not TITLE
 ("*Subsections*" "^   \\([A-Z].*\\)" 1))

woman-imenu ¶

A boolean value that defaults to nil. If non-nil then WoMan adds a Contents menu to the menubar by calling imenu-add-to-menubar.

woman-imenu-title ¶

A string representing the title to use if WoMan adds a Contents menu to the menubar. Default is "CONTENTS".

woman-use-topic-at-point ¶

A boolean value that defaults to nil. If non-nil then the woman command uses the word at point as the topic, without interactive confirmation, if it exists as a topic.

woman-use-topic-at-point-default ¶

A boolean value representing the default value for woman-use-topic-at-point. The default value is nil. [The variable woman-use-topic-at-point may be let-bound when woman is loaded, in which case its global value does not get defined. The function woman-file-name sets it to this value if it is unbound.]

woman-uncompressed-file-regexp ¶

A regular match expression used to select man source files (ignoring any compression extension). The default value is "\\.\\([0-9lmnt]\\w*\\)" [which means a filename extension is required].

Do not change this unless you are sure you know what you are doing!

The SysV standard man pages use two character suffixes, and this is becoming more common in the GNU world. For example, the man pages in the ncurses package include toe.1m, form.3x, etc.

Please note: an optional compression regexp will be appended, so this regexp must not end with any kind of string terminator such as $ or \\'.

woman-file-compression-regexp ¶

A regular match expression used to match compressed man file extensions for which decompressors are available and handled by auto-compression mode. It should begin with \\. and end with \\' and must not be optional. The default value is "\\.\\(g?z\\|bz2\\|xz\\)\\'", which matches the gzip, bzip2, and xz compression extensions.

Do not change this unless you are sure you know what you are doing!

[It should be compatible with the car of jka-compr-file-name-handler-entry, but that is unduly complicated, includes an inappropriate extension (.tgz) and is not loaded by default!]

woman-use-own-frame ¶

If non-nil then use a dedicated frame for displaying WoMan windows. This is useful only when WoMan is run under a window system such as X or Microsoft Windows that supports real multiple frames, in which case the default value is non-nil.

5.2 Formatting Options

These options control the layout that WoMan uses to format the man page.

woman-fill-column ¶

An integer specifying the right margin for formatted text. Default is 65.

woman-fill-frame ¶

A boolean value. If non-nil then most of the frame width is used, overriding the value of woman-fill-column. Default is nil.

woman-default-indent ¶

An integer specifying the default prevailing indent for the -man macros. Default is 5. Set this variable to 7 to emulate GNU/Linux man formatting.

woman-bold-headings ¶

A boolean value. If non-nil then embolden section and subsection headings. Default is t. [Heading emboldening is not standard man behavior.]

woman-ignore ¶

A boolean value. If non-nil then unrecognized requests etc. are ignored. Default is t. This gives the standard roff behavior. If nil then they are left in the buffer, which may aid debugging.

woman-preserve-ascii ¶

A boolean value. If non-nil then preserve ASCII characters in the WoMan buffer. Otherwise, non-ASCII characters (that display as ASCII) may remain, which is irrelevant unless the buffer is to be saved to a file. Default is nil.

woman-emulation ¶

WoMan emulation, currently either nroff or troff. Default is nroff. troff emulation is experimental and largely untested.

5.3 Faces

These options control the display faces that WoMan uses to format the man page.

woman-fontify ¶

A boolean value. If non-nil then WoMan assumes that face support is available. It defaults to a non-nil value if the display supports either colors or different fonts.

woman-italic-face ¶

Face for italic font in man pages. Default: italic, underlined, foreground red. This is overkill! troff uses just italic; nroff uses just underline. You should probably select either italic or underline as you prefer, but not both, although italic and underline work together perfectly well!

woman-bold-face ¶

Face for bold font in man pages. Default: bold, foreground blue.

woman-unknown-face ¶

Face for all unknown fonts in man pages. Default: foreground brown. Brown is a good compromise: it is distinguishable from the default but not enough so as to make font errors look terrible. (Files that use non-standard fonts seem to do so badly or in idiosyncratic ways!)

woman-addition-face ¶

Face for all additions made by WoMan to man pages. Default: foreground orange.

5.4 Special symbols

This section currently applies only to Microsoft Windows.

WoMan provides partial experimental support for special symbols, initially only for MS-Windows and only for MS-Windows fonts. This includes both non-ASCII characters from the main text font and use of a separate symbol font. Later, support will be added for other font types (e.g., bdf fonts) and for the X Window System. In Emacs 20.7, the current support works partially under Windows 9x but may not work on any other platform.

woman-use-extended-font ¶

A boolean value. If non-nil then WoMan may use non-ASCII characters from the default font. Default is t.

woman-use-symbol-font ¶

A boolean value. If non-nil then WoMan may use the symbol font. Default is nil, mainly because it may change the line spacing (at least in NTEmacs 20).

woman-symbol-font ¶

A string describing the symbol font to use for special characters. It should be compatible with, and the same size as, the default text font. Under MS-Windows, the default is

"-*-Symbol-normal-r-*-*-*-*-96-96-p-*-ms-symbol"