Re: Whether Man pages could visually be structured in an abstract form to be understood easier
On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 01:18:32PM +0100, Joe wrote:
> Man pages were written as pure text files, beginning in a period when
> that was pretty much all the Web could do. You can read man pages on a
> server, which will not usually have any graphic display ability beyond
> curses/ncurses.
Man pages are written using a textual markup system called ROFF,
which stands for "run off". ROFF dates back to 1971, according to
Wikipedia, and has been used for Unix's man pages since the very
beginning.
You can see the raw ROFF code in any of Debian's man pages. For example,
try: zless /usr/share/man/man1/dpkg.1.gz
ROFF is much older than "the Web" (by about 20-25 years). It originates
from a period when the manuals would have been printed on paper to be
read. As such, ROFF's output is text with printer markup (for example,
boldface is done by emitting each character twice with a backspace in
between the two instances, underlining is done by emitting a backspace
and an underscore, and so on).
Pagers such as less know how to take printer-markup ROFF output and
turn it into terminal escape sequences for boldface, etc. This gives
you the ability to read the man pages in a terminal, without having to
destroy a bunch of trees.
> It is only in the Windows world that server
> administrators are expected to need a GUI (and they don't really, most
> of them love PowerShell).
Amen.
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