tlug: tkman

[Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com>]

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tlug note from Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com>
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Hi all,

If you're like me, you have to read a lot of man pages. I never
liked xman so I usually read them in an xterm which was okay but
not great.

Then, I was reading the O'Reilly book Exploring Expect and it
mentioned tkman as a *really* good man reader. I picked up the
latest 2.0 beta and couldn't get it to run (it kept dieing with
some kind of clock error at line 2668), then spent hours looking
through all the CDs I have (Redhat, Slackware, Pacific HiTech,
etc) looking for an earlier version.

I finally found tkman-1.8b5.tar.gz on sunsite and it compiled
and ran right out of the box (well, I did have to change a few
lines in the Makefile but nothing major.) It turns out that
tkman is not distributed on any of the CD distributions by order
of Tom Phelps, the guy who wrote it.

So by now, you're asking, 'Is it any good?' The answer is --
it's great! 

Here's the introduction:

Introduction

A graphical manual page browser, TkMan offers two major
advantages over man(1) and xman: hypertext links to other man
pages (click on a word in the text which corresponds to a man
page, and you jump there), and better navigation within long man
pages with searches (both incremental and regular expression)
and jumps to section headers.  TkMan also offers some
convenience features, like a user-configurable list of commonly
used man pages, a one-click printout, and integration of whatis
and apropos. Further, one may highlight, as if with a yellow
marker, arbitrary passages of text in man pages and subsequently
jump directly to these passages by selecting an identifying
excerpt from a pulldown menu.  Finally, TkMan gives one control
over the directory-to-menu volume mapping of man pages with a
capability similar to but superior to xman's mandesc in that
rather than forcing all who share a man directory to follow a
single organization, TkMan gives control to the individual.  For
instance, one may decide he has no use for a large set of man
pages--say for instance the programmer routines in volumes 2, 3,
4, 8--and eliminate them from his personal database, or a Tcl/Tk
programmer may decide to group Tcl/Tk manual pages in their own
volume listing. 

Other features include:
 * full text search of manual pages (with Glimpse; optional)
 * when multiple pages match the search name, a pulldown list of
   all matches
 * regular expression searches for manual page names
 * a list of recently added or changed manual pages
 * a "history" list of the most recently visited pages
 * a preferences panel to control fonts, colors, and other
   system settings
 * compatibility with compressed pages (both as source and
   formatted)
 * diagnostics on your manual page installation
 * elision of those unsightly page headers and footers
 * and, when attempting to print a page available only in
   formatted form, reverse compilation into [tn]roff source,
   which can then be reformatted as good-looking PostScript. 

The latest version of TkMan is always available by anonymous FTP
at ftp.cs.Berkeley.EDU in the /ucb/people/phelps/tcltk
directory. 

Check it out.

Jim S.

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Sent by: Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com>
On: 11-Aug-97 at: 16:08:38 JST
http://www1.harenet.or.jp/~schweiz/
Kin, n.:
        An affliction of the blood
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