On: Colorized man pages

[rangibaby]

> And it would be really nice if I could read man pages in the terminal in a proportional font, but preserving alignment etc.

People would need to use tabs (gasp) instead of spaces for that :-P

[allendoerfer → rangibaby]

> People would need to use tabs (gasp) instead of spaces for that :-P

That would be madness.

[coldtea → allendoerfer]

Yea, why use a character for what it's supposed to do when you can use 40+ year old workaround for broken editors?

[Senji → rangibaby]

You could just do a naive 4spaces to 1tab conversion.

[greggyb → Senji]

This breaks for spacing between non-whitespace character. E.g. the list of flags, which may have varying lengths, but all descriptions start on the same alignment.

    This is a man page with a list of flags below

    --flag1        Description of flag1
    --secondflag   Description of secondflag

If we naively replaced the above with 4spaces=1tab we'd get the whitespace between flag1 and its description replaced with two tabs, and we'd get the whitespace between secondflag and its description left as a string of three space characters.

I have no idea what is actually used in man pages for alignment and spacing, but the example above is only to illustrate that 4space=1tab breaks even on trivial examples as a conversion rule.

[mzs → greggyb]

That does not matter for single dash and letter options. For double dash long options I like to split them on different lines so that you still have a lot of horizontal space for the descriptions themselves even with very ling option names, so a brute force way:

  This is a man page with a list of
  .I flags
  below
  .P
  .BR --flag :
  .RS
  Description of flag1
  .RE
  .P
  .BR --secondflag :
  .RS
  Description of secondflag
  .RE
  .P

Also for real tables:

  $ man tbl