Re: [tlug] man pages (was Browser blues)

[Josh Glover <tlug@example.com>]

Quoth Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon (Tue 2004-06-08 04:30:15AM +0900):

> I spend most of the day in front of a CRT monitor and since a white 
> screen gives me a headache and gets my eyes to hurting so much that I 
> can barely keep them (painfully) open, I have set my display set to 
> "Dark Blue" which works very well, but a number of things still come up 
> with stark, painful white backgrounds.

Most X terminal emulators will allow you to change the background by
putting this in your ~/.Xdefaults:

Xterm*foreground:        White
Xterm*background:        DarkBlue

> This is one reason I paid for the Linux version of EditPad Pro
> actually, as it works with a dark background.

So does XEmacs, again with stuff in the ~/.Xdefaults:

Emacs*background:       Black
Emacs*foreground:       Green
Emacs.background:       Black
Emacs.foreground:       Green
Emacs.cursorColor:      Green
Emacs.pointerColor:     Green

So does vim, as it runs inside your term.

> While I have been copy pasting man pages (man man for a start!) over to 
> a text editor screen by screen, is there some way to output that text 
> into a text editor more efficiently?  Is it possible to get the full 
> contents of a selection like "man man" into the clipboard?  The keyboard 
> shortcuts I'm used to using with text editors don't work and the mouse 
> will only highlight what is currently visible on the screen.....

Here is a hack:

man xterm -P cat

This will spew the whole manpage to standard output. You can then move
up in your scrollback buffer to the beginning of the man page and
select a bit of text (two characters, a word, a line, whatever). Now,
scroll back to the end of the page, position the mouse cursor where
you want the selection to end, and right-click. Now, the whole region
between where you started the selection and where you right-clicked is
in the copy buffer and you can middle-click to paste it into your
editor of choice.

*OR*

man xterm -P cat >man-xterm.txt

And open man-xterm.txt in your editor.

I would not be surpised if there was a tool out there to take
everything passed to it on standard input, stick it in the copy buffer,
and then output it again. Were I to write this tool, I would call it
xtee:

man xterm -P cat | xtee

Steve and Jim, do you guys know if there exists a utility like this?
If not, it would be pretty easy to write, wouldn't it? This might be
the impetus I needed to do a little X11 programming! :)

> Right!  I'm working on that.  The only things I use a few W2K boxes for 
> are some local map software, Eki-supato, and ... while I'm making 
> progress here, some photo management software that I quite like (ACDSee, 
> etc.).

If you like ACDSee, you should like gqview, as well.

Cheers,
Josh

-- 
Josh Glover

Gentoo Developer (http://dev.gentoo.org/~jmglov/)
Tokyo Linux Users Group Listmaster (http://www.tlug.jp/)

GPG keyID 0xDE8A3103 (C3E4 FA9E 1E07 BBDB 6D8B  07AB 2BF1 67A1 DE8A 3103)
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys DE8A3103

Attachment: pgp00018.pgp
Description: PGP signature