
History of Unix Manpages (2011) - fanf2
https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html
======
vngzs
I've always wondered: are there any efforts to bring manpages into a modern,
easy-to-write text format such as Markdown? I'm sure there are people who
would like to write manpages, but are intimidated by the relatively arcane
file format & folder structure [0].

We wouldn't want to break existing pages, and surely it would have to be a
cross-distro effort, and maybe Markdown isn't the perfect format without
modifications. But it's always felt like a natural evolution to me. I suspect
some developers (like: most Go program authors) would gladly supply a manual
if the workflow were more familiar to people.

[0]: [http://www.iitk.ac.in/LDP/HOWTO/Man-
Page/index.html](http://www.iitk.ac.in/LDP/HOWTO/Man-Page/index.html)

~~~
einpoklum
Do we have a terminal "renderer" for Markdown? That doesn't make too many
assumptions? The could be a start. Or perhaps a utility which renders Markdown
as troff.

Anyway, you should probably ask the author/maintainer of groff about these
matters: James Clark, whose homepage is
[http://www.jclark.com/](http://www.jclark.com/)

~~~
tyingq
Pandoc is a fairly popular package that can convert between md and man page
formats (many other formats also).

Perl's POD is also a pretty natural starting point that generates md and man
pages from a reasonable source format.

~~~
einpoklum
That's not what I was asking, actually. I meant rendering markdown directly on
a terminal, not going through troff.

But this is not so bad as a temporary measure - instead of having man render
the troff and pipe it into pager, pandoc will render the markdown into troff,
pipe it to man (I guess), then to pager. Shouldn't be terribly difficult to
set up.

~~~
tyingq
Ah, okay. There's mdless:
[https://github.com/ttscoff/mdless](https://github.com/ttscoff/mdless)

Also, for Windows, Microsoft made something similar:
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/powershell/module/microsoft...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/show-markdown)

------
v3gas
There's also this: [https://twobithistory.org/2017/09/28/the-lineage-of-
man.html](https://twobithistory.org/2017/09/28/the-lineage-of-man.html)

