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WoMan: Browse UN*X Manual Pages "Wo (without) Man"

Software Version 0.54 (beta)
Manual Last Updated Time-stamp: <03 August 2000>

Francis J. Wright
School of Mathematical Sciences
Queen Mary and Westfield College (University of London)
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK

Node:Introduction, Next:, Previous:Top, Up:Top

Introduction

This version of WoMan should run with GNU Emacs 20.3 or later on any platform. It has not been tested, and may not run, with any other version of Emacs. It was developed primarily on various versions of Microsoft Windows, but has also been tested on MS-DOS, and various versions of UNIX and Linux.

WoMan is distributed with GNU Emacs 21, and the current source code and documentation files are available from my web server.

WoMan implements a subset of the formatting performed by the Emacs man (or manual-entry) command to format a UN*X-style manual page (usually abbreviated to man page) for display, but without calling any external programs. It is intended to emulate the whole of the ROFF -man macro package, plus those ROFF requests (see Background) that are most commonly used in man pages. However, the emulation is modified to include the reformatting done by the Emacs man command. No hyphenation is performed.

Advantages
Much more direct, does not require any external programs. Supports completion on man page names.
Disadvantages
Not a complete emulation. Currently no support for eqn or tbl. Slightly slower for large man pages (but usually faster for small- and medium-size pages).

This browser works quite well on simple well-written man files. It works less well on idiosyncratic files that "break the rules" or use the more obscure ROFF requests directly. Current test results are available in the file woman.status.

WoMan supports the use of compressed man files via auto-compression-mode by turning it on if necessary. But you may need to adjust the user option woman-file-compression-regexp. See Interface Options.

Brief help on the WoMan interactive commands and user options, all of which begin with the prefix woman- (or occasionally WoMan-), is available most easily by loading WoMan and then either running the command woman-mini-help or selecting the WoMan menu option Mini Help.

WoMan is (of course) still under development! Please let me know what doesn't work - I am adding and improving functionality as testing shows that it is necessary. Guidance on reporting bugs is given below. See Reporting Bugs.

Node:Background, Next:, Previous:Introduction, Up:Top

Background

WoMan is a browser for traditional UN*X-style manual page documentation. Each such document is conventionally referred to as a manual page, or man page for short, even though some are very much longer than one page. A man page is a document written using the UN*X "man" macros, which are themselves written in the NROFF/TROFF text processing markup language. NROFF and TROFF are text processors originally written for the UNIX operating system by Joseph F. Ossanna at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA. They are closely related, and except in the few cases where the distinction between them is important I will refer to them both ambiguously as ROFF.

ROFF markup consists of requests and escape sequences. A request occupies a complete line and begins with either a period or a single forward quote. An escape sequences is embedded within the input text and begins (by default) with a backslash. The original man macro package defines 20 new ROFF requests implemented as macros, which were considered to be sufficient for writing man pages. But whilst in principle man pages use only the man macros, in practice a significant number use many other ROFF requests.

The distinction between TROFF and NROFF is that TROFF was designed to drive a phototypesetter whereas NROFF was designed to produce essentially ASCII output for a character-based device similar to a teletypewriter (usually abbreviated to "teletype" or "tty"). Hence, TROFF supports much finer control over output positioning than does NROFF and can be seen as a forerunner of TeX. Traditionally, man pages are either formatted by TROFF for typesetting or by NROFF for printing on a character printer or displaying on a screen. Of course, over the last 25 years or so, the distinction between typeset output on paper and characters on a screen has become blurred by the fact that most screens now support bit-mapped displays, so that any information that can be printed can also be rendered on screen, the only difference being the resolution.

Nevertheless, UN*X-style manual page documentation is still normally browsed on screen by running a program called man. This program looks in a predefined set of directories for the man page matching a specified topic, then either formats the source file by running NROFF or recovers a pre-formatted file, and displays it via a pager such as more. NROFF normally formats for a printer, so it paginates the output, numbers the pages, etc., most of which is irrelevant when the document is browsed as a continuous scrollable document on screen. The only concession to on-screen browsing normally implemented by the man program is to squeeze consecutive blank lines into a single blank line.

For some time, Emacs has offered an improved interface for browsing man pages in the form of the Emacs man (or manual-entry) command, see Documentation. This command runs man as described above, perhaps in the background, and then post-processes the output to remove much of the NROFF pagination such as page headers and footers, and places the result into an Emacs buffer. It puts this buffer into a special major mode, which is tailored for man page browsing, and provides a number of useful navigation commands, support for following references, etc. It provides some support for special display faces (fonts), but no special menu or mouse support. The Emacs man package appears to have been developed over about 10 years, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.

There is considerable inefficiency in having NROFF paginate a document and then removing most of the pagination!

WoMan is an Emacs Lisp library that provides an emulation of the functionality of the Emacs man command, the main difference being that WoMan does not use any external programs. The only situation in which WoMan might use an external program is when the source file is compressed, when WoMan will use the standard Emacs automatic decompression facility, which does call an external program.

I began developing WoMan in the Spring of 1997 and the first version was released in May 1997. The original motivation for WoMan was the fact that many GNU and UN*X programs are ported to other platforms and come with UN*X-style manual page documentation. This may be difficult to read because ports of the UN*X-style man program can be a little awkward to set up. I decided that it should not be too hard to emulate the 20 man macros directly, without treating them as macros and largely ignoring the underlying ROFF requests, given the text processing capabilities of Emacs. This proved to be essentially true, and it did not take a great deal of work to be able to format simple man pages acceptably.

One problem arose with the significant number of man pages that use ROFF requests in addition to the man macros, and since releasing the first version of WoMan I have been continually extending it to support more ROFF requests. WoMan can now format a significant proportion of the man pages that I have tested, either well or at least readably. However, I have added capabilities partly by making additional passes through the document, a design that is fundamentally flawed. This can only be solved by a major re-design of WoMan to handle the major formatting within a single recursive pass, rather than the present multiple passes without any significant recursion. There are some ROFF requests that cannot be handled satisfactorily within the present design. Some of these are currently handled by kludges that "usually more or less work".

The principle advantage of WoMan is that it does not require man, and indeed the name WoMan is a contraction of "without man". But it has other advantages. It does not paginate the document, so it does not need to un-paginate it again, thereby saving time. It could take full advantage of the display capabilities available to it, and I hope to develop WoMan to take advantage of developments in Emacs itself. At present, WoMan uses several display faces to support bold and italic text, to indicate other fonts, etc. The default faces are also coloured, but the choice of faces is customizable. WoMan provides menu support for navigation and mouse support for following references, in addition to the navigation facilities provided by man mode. WoMan has (this) texinfo documentation!

WoMan does not replace man, although it does use a number of the facilities implemented in the Emacs man library. WoMan and man can happily co-exist, which is very useful for comparison and debugging purposes. The only way in which WoMan affects man is that it adds a timer to indicate how long man has taken to format a man page. The timing is as compatible as possible with the timing built into WoMan, for as fair a comparison as possible. The time comparison seems to depend on the details of the platform, the version of man in use, etc, but times are similar and WoMan is never significantly slower than man. This is despite the fact that WoMan is running byte code whereas most of the formatting done by man uses machine code, and is a testimony to the quality of the Emacs Lisp system.

NROFF simulates non-ASCII characters by using one or more ASCII characters. WoMan should be able to do much better than this. I have recently begun to add support for WoMan to use more of the characters in its default font and to use a symbol font, and it is an aspect that I intend to develop further in the near future. It should be possible to move WoMan from an emulation of NROFF to an emulation of TROFF as GNU Emacs moves to providing bit-mapped display facilities.

Node:Installation, Next:, Previous:Background, Up:Top

Installation and Setup

No installation is necessary if you just want to run the version of WoMan distributed with GNU Emacs 21 or later, although some additional setup may still be desirable.

If you are installing woman.el, either to update the version distributed with GNU Emacs or because WoMan was not distributed with your version of Emacs, then you need to put the file in a directory in your Emacs load path and byte compile it. A good directory to use is the site-lisp directory in your Emacs file tree, e.g. /usr/local/share/emacs/version/site-lisp/ (where version is your Emacs version), provided you have write access to it. If you use a directory that is not included by default in your Emacs load path then you need to add something like this to your .emacs initialisation file: 

(add-to-list 'load-path "my-lisp")

where my-lisp is the pathname of the directory. See Init File, for further details on customizing Emacs in general.

You can byte-compile the file by using the Emacs command byte-compile-file or by opening the directory containing the file, putting point on it and pressing the key B. (In fact, if the file is compiled then it is only the compiled file that needs to be in the Emacs load path, but leaving the source file there will do no harm.)

Setup

Setup that is either necessary or desirable consists of adding a small amount of Emacs Lisp code to your .emacs initialisation file. It may be necessary (or at least convenient) to make WoMan autoload (if you are not running GNU Emacs 21 or later) and to set the search path used by the woman interface. You may also find it convenient to make various WoMan menu and key bindings available and to make WoMan customizable even before WoMan has been loaded.

It is possible to run WoMan from a command line (from outside or even from inside Emacs) by suitably configuring your command interpreter.

Node:Autoloading, Next:, Previous:Installation, Up:Installation

Autoloading

If you are not running GNU Emacs 21 or later then you are recommended to add these autoloads to your .emacs file: 

(autoload 'woman "woman"
  "Decode and browse a UN*X man page." t)
(autoload 'woman-find-file "woman"
  "Find, decode and browse a specific UN*X man-page file." t)
(autoload 'woman-dired-find-file "woman"
  "In dired, run the WoMan man-page browser on this file." t)

(In GNU Emacs 21 and later these autoloads are predefined.)

Node:Search Path, Next:, Previous:Autoloading, Up:Installation

Search Path

The next step is necessary if you want to use the friendliest WoMan interface, which is recommended in general. If the MANPATH environment variable is set then WoMan will use it; alternatively (or additionally), if your platform uses a man configuration file (as do many versions of Linux) then WoMan will use it, provided it can find it. (This may need configuration. See Interface Options.) If these mechanisms correctly define the search path for man pages then no further action is required.

Otherwise you may need to customize the user option woman-manpath, and you may also want to customize the user option woman-path. See Customization. Now you can execute the extended command woman and enter or select a manual topic using completion, and if necessary select a filename, again using completion. By default, WoMan suggests the word nearest to point in the current buffer as the topic.

Node:Auto Bindings, Next:, Previous:Search Path, Up:Installation

Preloading Menu and Key Bindings

Once WoMan is loaded it adds an item to the Help menu and defines one or more keys in dired mode to run WoMan on the current file. If you would like these facilities always to be available, even before WoMan is loaded, then add the following to your .emacs file: 

(define-key-after menu-bar-manuals-menu [woman]
  '(menu-item "Read Man Page (WoMan)..." woman
              :help "Man-page documentation Without Man") t)

(add-hook 'dired-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (define-key dired-mode-map "W" 'woman-dired-find-file)))

(By default, WoMan will automatically define the dired keys W and w when it loads, but only if they are not already defined. This behaviour is controlled by the user option woman-dired-keys. Note that the dired-x (dired extra) package binds dired-copy-filename-as-kill to the key w, although W appears to be unused. The dired-x package will over-write the WoMan binding for w, whereas (by default) WoMan will not overwrite the dired-x binding.)

Node:Auto Customization, Next:, Previous:Auto Bindings, Up:Installation

Preloading Customization

WoMan supports the GNU Emacs 20+ customization facility, and puts a customization group called WoMan in the Help group under the top-level Emacs group. In order to be able to customize WoMan without first loading it, add the following to your .emacs file: 

(defgroup woman nil
  "Browse UNIX manual pages `wo (without) man'."
  :tag "WoMan" :group 'help :load "woman")

Node:Command Line, Previous:Auto Customization, Up:Installation

Command Line Access

If you really want to square the man-woman circle then you can! If you run the GNU command interpreter bash then you might care to define the following bash function in your bash initialisation file .bashrc: 

man() { gnudoit -q '(raise-frame (selected-frame)) (woman' \"$1\" ')' ; }

If you use a Microsoft command interpreter (command.com or cmd.exe) then you can create a file called man.bat somewhere in your path containing the two lines: 

@echo off
gnudoit -q (raise-frame (selected-frame)) (woman \"%1\")

and then (e.g. from a command prompt or the Run... option in the Windows Start menu) just execute 

man man_page_name

(Of course, if you already have a man command installed then you could call these commands woman instead of man.)

The above examples assume that you have the gnuserv Emacs client-server package installed (which I recommend). It would be possible to do something similar by calling Emacs directly, but that is less satisfactory, because you are likely to end up with multiple copies of Emacs running, which is generally inelegant, inefficient and inconvenient. If you run a different command interpreter then something similar to the above suggestions should be possible.

Node:Finding, Next:, Previous:Installation, Up:Top

Finding and Formatting Man Pages

WoMan provides three user interfaces for finding and formatting man pages:

  • a topic interface similar to that provided by the standard Emacs man command;
  • a family of filename interfaces analogous to the standard Emacs view-file command;
  • an automatic interface that detects the file type from its contents. (This is currently neither well tested, well supported nor recommended!)

The topic and filename interfaces support completion in the usual way.

The topic interface is generally the most convenient for regular use, although it may require some special setup, especially if your machine does not already have a conventional man installation (which WoMan tries to detect).

The simplest filename interface command woman-find-file can always be used with no setup at all (provided WoMan is installed and loaded or set up to autoload).

The automatic interface always requires special setup.

Case-Dependence of Filenames

By default, WoMan ignores case in file pathnames only when it seems appropriate. Microsoft Windows users who want complete case independence should set the special NTEmacs variable w32-downcase-file-names to t and use all lower case when setting WoMan file paths.

Node:Topic, Next:, Previous:Finding, Up:Finding

Topic Interface

The topic interface is accessed principally via the command woman. The same command can be accessed via the menu item Help->Manuals->Read Man Page (WoMan)... either once WoMan has been loaded or if it is set up specially. See Installation and Setup. The command reads a manual topic in the minibuffer, which can be the basename of a man file anywhere in the man file structure. The "basename" in this context means the filename without any directory component and without any extension or suffix components that relate to the file type. So, for example, if there is a compressed source file in Chapter 5 of the UNIX Programmer's Manual with the full pathname /usr/local/man/man5/man.conf.5.gz then the topic is man.conf. Provided WoMan is configured correctly, this topic will appear among the completions offered by woman. If more than one file has the same topic name then WoMan will prompt for which file to format. Completion of topics is case insensitive.

Clearly, woman has to know where to look for man files and there are two customizable user options that store this information: woman-manpath and woman-path. See Interface Options. If woman-manpath is not set explicitly then WoMan tries to pick up the information that would be used by the man command, as follows. If the environment variable MANPATH is set, which seems to be the standard mechanism under UNIX, then WoMan parses that. Otherwise, if WoMan can find a configuration file named (by default) man.conf (or something very similar), which seems to be the standard mechanism under GNU/Linux, then it parses that. To be precise, "something very similar" means having two name components separated by a dot and respectively containing "man" and beginning with "conf", e.g. manual.configuration. The search path and/or precise full path name for this file are set by the value of the customizable user option woman-man.conf-path. If all else fails, WoMan uses a plausible default man search path.

If the above default configuration does not work correctly for any reason then simply customize the value of woman-manpath. To access man files that are not in a conventional man file hierarchy, customize the value of woman-path to include the directories containing the files. In this way, woman can access manual files anywhere in the entire file system.

There are two differences between woman-manpath and woman-path. Firstly, the elements of woman-manpath must be directories that contain directories of man files, whereas the elements of woman-path must be directories that contain man files directly. Secondly, the last directory component of each element of woman-path is treated as a regular (Emacs) match expression rather than a fixed name, which allows collections of related directories to be specified succinctly.

For topic completion to work, WoMan must build a list of all the manual files that it can access, which can be very slow, especially if a network is involved. For this reason, it caches various amounts of information, after which retrieving it from the cache is very fast. If the cache ever gets out of synchronism with reality, running the woman command with a prefix argument (e.g. C-u M-x woman) will force it to rebuild its cache. This is necessary only if the names or locations of any man files change; it is not necessary if only their contents change. It would always be necessary if such a change occurred whilst Emacs were running and after WoMan has been loaded. It may be necessary if such a change occurs between Emacs sessions and persistent caching is used, although WoMan can detect some changes that invalidate its cache and rebuild it automatically.

Customize the variable woman-cache-filename to save the cache between Emacs sessions. This is recommended only if the woman command is too slow the first time it is run in an Emacs session, while it builds its cache in main memory, which may be very slow. See The WoMan Topic Cache, for further details.

  • Cache: The WoMan Topic Cache
  • Word at point: Using the ``Word at Point'' as a Topic Suggestion

Node:Cache, Next:, Previous:Topic, Up:Topic

The WoMan Topic Cache

The amount of information that WoMan caches (in main memory and, optionally, saved to disc) is controlled by the user option woman-cache-level. There is a trade-off between the speed with which WoMan can find a file and the size of the cache, and the default setting gives a reasonable compromise.

The woman command always performs a certain amount of caching in main memory, but it can also write its cache to the filestore as a persistent cache under control of the user option woman-cache-filename. If persistent caching is turned on then WoMan re-loads its internal cache from the cache file almost instantaneously, so that there is never any perceptible start-up delay except when WoMan rebuilds its cache. Persistent caching is currently turned off by default. This is because users with persistent caching turned on may overlook the need to force WoMan to rebuild its cache the first time they run it after they have installed new man files; with persistent caching turned off, WoMan automatically rebuilds its cache every time it is run in a new Emacs session.

A prefix argument always causes the woman command (only) to rebuild its topic cache, and to re-save it to woman-cache-filename if this variable has a non-nil value. This is necessary if the names of any of the directories or files in the paths specified by woman-manpath or woman-path change. If WoMan user options that affect the cache are changed then WoMan will automatically update its cache file on disc (if one is in use) the next time it is run in a new Emacs session.

Node:Word at point, Previous:Cache, Up:Topic

Using the "Word at Point" as a Topic Suggestion

By default, the woman command uses the word nearest to point in the current buffer as a suggestion for the topic to look up. The topic must be confirmed or edited in the minibuffer. This suggestion can be turned off, or woman can use the suggested topic without confirmation if possible, which is controlled by customizing the user option woman-topic-at-point to nil or t respectively. (Its default value is neither nil nor t, meaning ask for confirmation.)

The variable woman-topic-at-point can also be rebound locally (using let), which may be useful to provide special private key bindings, e.g. this key binding for C-c w runs WoMan on the topic at point without seeking confirmation: 

(global-set-key "\C-cw"
                (lambda ()
                  (interactive)
                  (let ((woman-topic-at-point t))
                    (woman))))

Node:Filename, Next:, Previous:Topic, Up:Finding

Filename Interface

The commands in this family are completely independent of the topic interface, caching mechanism, etc.

The filename interface is accessed principally via the extended command woman-find-file, which is available without any configuration at all (provided WoMan is installed and loaded or set up to autoload). This command can be used to browse any accessible man file, regardless of its filename or location. If the file is compressed then automatic file decompression must already be turned on (e.g. see the Help->Options submenu) - it is turned on automatically only by the woman topic interface.

Once WoMan is loaded (or if specially set up), various additional commands in this family are available. In a dired buffer, the command woman-dired-find-file allows the file on the same line as point to be formatted and browsed by WoMan. It is bound to the key W in the dired mode map and added to the dired major mode menu. It may also be bound to w, unless this key is bound by another library, which it is by dired-x, for example. Because it is quite likely that other libraries will extend the capabilities of such a commonly used mode as dired, the precise key bindings added by WoMan to the dired mode map are controlled by the user option woman-dired-keys.

When a tar (Tape ARchive) file is visited in Emacs, it is opened in tar mode, which parses the tar file and shows a dired-like view of its contents. The WoMan command woman-tar-extract-file allows the file on the same line as point to be formatted and browsed by WoMan. It is bound to the key w in the tar mode map and added to the tar major mode menu.

The command woman-reformat-last-file, which is bound to the key R in WoMan mode and available on the major mode menu, reformats the last file formatted by WoMan. This may occasionally be useful if formatting parameters, such as the fill column, are changed, or perhaps if the buffer is somehow corrupted.

The command woman-decode-buffer can be used to decode and browse the current buffer if it is visiting a man file, although it is primarily used internally by WoMan.

Node:Automatic, Previous:Filename, Up:Finding

Automatic Interface

Emacs provides an interface to detect automatically the format of a file and decode it when it is visited. It is used primarily by the facilities for editing rich (i.e. formatted) text, as a way to store formatting information transparently as ASCII markup. WoMan can in principle use this interface, but it must be configured explicitly.

This use of WoMan does not seem to be particularly advantageous, so it is not really supported. It originated during early experiments on how best to implement WoMan, before I implemented the current topic interface, and I subsequently stopped using it. I might revive it as a mechanism for storing pre-formatted WoMan files, somewhat analogous to the standard UN*X catman facility. In the meantime, it exists for anyone who wants to experiment with it. Once it is set up it is simply a question of visiting the file and there is no WoMan-specific user interface!

To use it, put something like this in your .emacs file. [The call to set-visited-file-name is to avoid font-locking triggered by automatic major mode selection.] 

(autoload 'woman-decode-region "woman")

(add-to-list 'format-alist
             '(man "UN*X man-page source format" "\\.\\(TH\\|ig\\) "
                   woman-decode-region nil nil
                   (lambda (arg)
                     set-visited-file-name
                     (file-name-sans-extension buffer-file-name))))

Node:Browsing, Next:, Previous:Finding, Up:Top

Browsing Man Pages

Once a man page has been found and formatted, WoMan provides a browsing interface that is essentially the same as that provided by the standard Emacs man command (and much of the code is inherited from the man library, which WoMan currently requires). Many WoMan facilities can be accessed from the WoMan major mode menu as well as via key bindings, etc.

WoMan does not produce any page breaks or page numbers, and in fact does not paginate the man page at all, since this is not appropriate for continuous online browsing. It produces a document header line that is constructed from the standard man page header and footer. Apart from that, the appearance of the formatted man page should be almost identical to what would be produced by man, with consecutive blank lines squeezed to a single blank line.

Node:Fonts, Next:, Previous:Browsing, Up:Browsing

Fonts and Faces

Fonts used by ROFF are handled by WoMan as faces, the details of which are customizable. See Faces. WoMan supports both the italic and bold fonts normally used in man pages, together with a single face to represent all unknown fonts (which are occasionally used in "non-standard" man pages, usually to represent a "typewriter" font) and a face to indicate additional symbols introduced by WoMan. This currently means the characters ^ and _ used to indicate super- and sub-scripts, which are not displayed well by WoMan.

Node:Navigation, Next:, Previous:Fonts, Up:Browsing

Navigation

Man (and hence WoMan) mode can be thought of as a superset of view mode. The buffer cannot be edited, so keys that would normally self-insert are used for navigation. The WoMan key bindings are a minor modification of the man key bindings.

<SPC>
Scroll the man page up the window (scroll-up).
<DEL>
Scroll the man page down the window (scroll-down).
n
Move point to the Nth next section - default 1 (Man-next-section).
p
Move point to Nth previous section - default 1 (Man-previous-section).
g
Move point to the specified section (Man-goto-section).
s
Move point to the "SEE ALSO" section (Man-goto-see-also-section). Actually the section moved to is described by Man-see-also-regexp.

Node:References, Next:, Previous:Navigation, Up:Browsing

Following References

Man pages usually contain a "SEE ALSO" section containing references to other man pages. If these man pages are installed then WoMan can easily be directed to follow the reference, i.e. to find and format the man page. When the mouse is passed over a correctly formatted reference it is highlighted, in which case clicking the middle button <mouse-2> will cause WoMan to follow the reference. Alternatively, when point is over such a reference the key <RET> will follow the reference.

Any word in the buffer can be used as a reference by clicking <mouse-2> over it provided the Meta key is also used (although in general such a "reference" will not lead to a man page). Alternatively, the key r allows completion to be used to select a reference to follow, based on the word at point as default.

<mouse-2>
Run WoMan with word under mouse as topic (woman-mouse-2). The word must be mouse-highlighted unless woman-mouse-2 is used with the Meta key.
<RET>
Get the man page for the topic under (or nearest to) point (man-follow).
r
Get one of the man pages referred to in the "SEE ALSO" section (Man-follow-manual-reference). Specify which reference to use; default is based on word at point.

Node:Changing, Next:, Previous:References, Up:Browsing

Changing the Current Man Page

The man page currently being browsed by WoMan can be changed in several ways. The command woman can be invoked to format another man page, or the current WoMan buffer can be buried or killed. WoMan maintains a ring of formatted man pages, and it is possible to move forwards and backwards in this ring by moving to the next or previous man page. It is sometimes useful to reformat the current page, for example after the right margin (the wrap column) or some other formatting parameter has been changed.

Buffers formatted by Man and WoMan are completely unrelated, even though some of the commands to manipulate them are superficially the same (and share code).

m
Run the command man to get a Un*x manual page and put it in a buffer. This command is the top-level command in the man package. It runs a Un*x command to retrieve and clean a man page in the background and places the results in a Man mode (man page browsing) buffer. If a man buffer already exists for this man page, it will display immediately. This works exactly the same if WoMan is loaded, except that the formatting time is displayed in the mini-buffer.
w
Run the command woman exactly as if the extended command or menu item had been used.
q
Bury the buffer containing the current man page (Man-quit), i.e. move it to the bottom of the buffer stack.
k
Kill the buffer containing the current man page (Man-kill), i.e. delete it completely so that it can be retrieved only by formatting the page again.
M-p
Find the previous WoMan buffer (WoMan-previous-manpage).
M-n
Find the next WoMan buffer (WoMan-next-manpage).
R
Call WoMan to reformat the last man page formatted by WoMan (woman-reformat-last-file), e.g. after changing the fill column.

Node:Convenience, Next:, Previous:Changing, Up:Browsing

Convenience Key Bindings

-
Begin a negative numeric argument for the next command (negative-argument).
0 .. 9
Part of the numeric argument for the next command (digit-argument).
<
.
Move point to the beginning of the buffer; leave mark at previous position (beginning-of-buffer).
>
Move point to the end of the buffer; leave mark at previous position (end-of-buffer).
?
Display documentation of current major mode and minor modes (describe-mode). The major mode description comes first, followed by the minor modes, each on a separate page.

Node:Imenu, Previous:Convenience, Up:Browsing

Imenu Support; Contents Menu

The WoMan menu provides an option to make a contents menu for the current man page (using imenu). Alternatively, if you customize the option woman-imenu to t then WoMan will do it automatically for every man page. The menu title is set by the option woman-imenu-title, which is "CONTENTS" by default. The menu shows manual sections and subsections by default, but you can change this by customizing woman-imenu-generic-expression.

WoMan is configured not to replace spaces in an imenu *Completion* buffer. For further documentation on the use of imenu, such as menu sorting, see the source file imenu.el, which is distributed with GNU Emacs.

Node:Customization, Next:, Previous:Browsing, Up:Top

Customization

All WoMan user options are customizable, and it is recommended to change them only via the standard Emacs customization facilities. WoMan defines a top-level customization group called WoMan under the parent group Help. The WoMan customization group is available only once WoMan has been loaded unless it is specially set up to be automatically available. See Preloading Customization. It can be accessed either via the standard Emacs facilities, e.g. via the Help->Customize submenu, or via the WoMan major mode menu.

The top-level WoMan group contains only a few general options and three subgroups. The hooks are provided only for special purposes that, for example, require code to be executed, and should be changed only via Customization or the function add-hook. Most customization should be possible via existing user options.

woman-show-log
A boolean value that defaults to nil. If non-nil then show the *WoMan-Log* buffer if appropriate, i.e. if any warning messages are written to it. See The *WoMan-Log* Buffer.
woman-pre-format-hook
A hook run immediately before formatting a buffer. It might, for example, be used for face customization. See Faces, however.
woman-post-format-hook
A hook run immediately after formatting a buffer. It might, for example, be used for installing a dynamic menu using imenu. (However. in this case it is better to use the built-in WoMan imenu support. See Imenu Support; Contents Menu.)

Customization Subgroups

WoMan Interface
These options control the process of locating the appropriate file to browse, and the appearance of the browsing interface.
WoMan Formatting
These options control the layout that WoMan uses to format the man page.
WoMan Faces
These options control the display faces that WoMan uses to format the man page.

Node:Interface Options, Next:, Previous:Customization, Up:Customization

Interface Options

These options control the process of locating the appropriate file to browse, and the appearance of the browsing interface.

woman-man.conf-path
A list of strings representing directories to search and/or files to try for a man configuration file. The default is 
("/etc" "/usr/local/lib")

[for GNU/Linux and Cygwin respectively.] A trailing separator (/ for UNIX etc.) on directories is optional and the filename matched if a directory is specified is the first to match the regexp man.*\.conf. If the environment variable MANPATH is not set but a configuration file is found then it is parsed instead (or as well) to provide a default value for woman-manpath.

woman-manpath
A list of strings representing directory trees to search for UN*X manual files. Each element should be the name of a directory that contains subdirectories of the form man?, or more precisely subdirectories selected by the value of woman-manpath-man-regexp. Non-directory and unreadable files are ignored.

If not set then the environment variable MANPATH is used. If no such environment variable is found, the default list is determined by consulting the man configuration file if found. By default this is expected to be either /etc/man.config or /usr/local/lib/man.conf, which is controlled by the user option woman-man.conf-path. An empty substring of MANPATH denotes the default list. Otherwise, the default value of this variable is 

("/usr/man" "/usr/local/man")

Any environment variables (names of which must have the UN*X-style form $NAME, e.g. $HOME, $EMACSDATA, $EMACS_DIR, regardless of platform) are evaluated first but each element must evaluate to a single directory name. Trailing /s are ignored. (Specific directories in woman-path are also searched.)

On Microsoft platforms I recommend including drive letters explicitly, e.g. 

("C:/Cygwin/usr/man" "C:/usr/man" "C:/usr/local/man")

The MANPATH environment variable may be set using DOS semi-colon-separated or UN*X / Cygwin colon-separated syntax (but not mixed).

woman-manpath-man-regexp
A regular expression to match man directories under the woman-manpath directories. These normally have names of the form man?. Its default value is "[Mm][Aa][Nn]", which is case-insensitive mainly for the benefit of Microsoft platforms. Its purpose is to avoid directories such as cat?, ., .., etc.
woman-path
A list of strings representing specific directories to search for UN*X manual files. For example 
("/emacs/etc")

These directories are searched in addition to the directory trees specified in woman-manpath. Each element should be a directory string or nil, which represents the current directory when the path is expanded and cached. However, the last component (only) of each directory string is treated as a regexp (Emacs, not shell) and the string is expanded into a list of matching directories. Non-directory and unreadable files are ignored. The default value on MS-DOS is 

("$DJDIR/info" "$DJDIR/man/cat[1-9onlp]")

and on other platforms is nil.

Any environment variables (names of which must have the UN*X-style form $NAME, e.g. $HOME, $EMACSDATA, $EMACS_DIR, regardless of platform) are evaluated first but each element must evaluate to a single directory name (regexp, see above). For example 

("$EMACSDATA")

or equivalently 

("$EMACS_DIR/etc")

Trailing /s are discarded. (The directory trees in woman-manpath are also searched.) On Microsoft platforms I recommend including drive letters explicitly.

woman-cache-level
A positive integer representing the level of topic caching:

  1. cache only the topic and directory lists (uses minimal memory, but not recommended);
  2. cache also the directories for each topic (faster, without using much more memory);
  3. cache also the actual filenames for each topic (fastest, but uses twice as much memory).

The default value is currently 2, a good general compromise. If the woman command is slow to find files then try 3, which may be particularly beneficial with large remote-mounted man directories. Run the woman command with a prefix argument or delete the cache file woman-cache-filename for a change to take effect. (Values < 1 behave like 1; values > 3 behave like 3.)

woman-cache-filename
Either a string representing the full pathname of the WoMan directory and topic cache file, or nil. It is used to save and restore the cache between Emacs sessions. This is especially useful with remote-mounted man page files! The default value of nil suppresses this action. The "standard" non-nil filename is ~/.wmncach.el. Remember that a prefix argument forces the woman command to update and re-write the cache.
woman-dired-keys
A list of dired mode keys to be defined to run WoMan on the current file, e.g. ("w" "W") or any non-nil atom to automatically define w and W if they are unbound, or nil to do nothing. Default is t.
woman-imenu-generic-expression
Imenu support for Sections and Subsections: an alist with elements of the form (MENU-TITLE REGEXP INDEX) - see the documentation for imenu-generic-expression. Default value is 
((nil "\n\\([A-Z].*\\)" 1)  ; SECTION, but not TITLE
 ("*Subsections*" "^   \\([A-Z].*\\)" 1))

woman-imenu
A boolean value that defaults to nil. If non-nil then WoMan adds a Contents menu to the menubar by calling imenu-add-to-menubar.
woman-imenu-title
A string representing the title to use if WoMan adds a Contents menu to the menubar. Default is "CONTENTS".
woman-topic-at-point
A symbol, which may be either t, nil or confirm, that controls the use by woman of the "word at point" as a topic suggestion. If it is non-nil then the woman command uses the word at point as an initial topic suggestion when it reads a topic from the minibuffer; if it is t then woman uses the word at point without interactive confirmation if it exists as a topic. The value confirm means suggest a topic and ask for confirmation. The default value is that of woman-topic-at-point-default.
woman-topic-at-point-default
A symbol, which may be either t, nil or confirm, representing the default value for woman-topic-at-point. The default value is confirm. [The variable woman-topic-at-point may be let-bound when woman is loaded, in which case its global value does not get defined. The function woman-file-name sets it to this value if it is unbound.]
woman-uncompressed-file-regexp
A regular match expression used to select man source files (ignoring any compression extension). The default value is "\\.\\([0-9lmnt]\\w*\\)" [which means a filename extension is required].

Do not change this unless you are sure you know what you are doing!

The SysV standard man pages use two character suffixes, and this is becoming more common in the GNU world. For example, the man pages in the ncurses package include toe.1m, form.3x, etc.

Note: an optional compression regexp will be appended, so this regexp must not end with any kind of string terminator such as $ or \\'.

woman-file-compression-regexp
A regular match expression used to match compressed man file extensions for which decompressors are available and handled by auto-compression mode. It should begin with \\. and end with \\' and must not be optional. The default value is "\\.\\(g?z\\|bz2\\)\\'", which matches the gzip and bzip2 compression extensions.

Do not change this unless you are sure you know what you are doing!

[It should be compatible with the car of jka-compr-file-name-handler-entry, but that is unduly complicated, includes an inappropriate extension (.tgz) and is not loaded by default!]

woman-use-own-frame
If non-nil then use a dedicated frame for displaying WoMan windows. This is useful only when WoMan is run under a window system such as X or Microsoft Windows that supports real multiple frames, in which case the default value is non-nil.

Node:Formatting Options, Next:, Previous:Interface Options, Up:Customization

Formatting Options

These options control the layout that WoMan uses to format the man page.

woman-fill-column
An integer specifying the right margin for formatted text. Default is 65.
woman-fill-frame
A boolean value. If non-nil then most of the frame width is used, overriding the value of woman-fill-column. Default is nil.
woman-default-indent
An integer specifying the default prevailing indent for the -man macros. Default is 5. Set this variable to 7 to emulate Linux man formatting.
woman-bold-headings
A boolean value. If non-nil then embolden section and subsection headings. Default is t. [Heading emboldening is not standard man behaviour.]
woman-ignore
A boolean value. If non-nil then unrecognised requests etc. are ignored. Default is t. This gives the standard ROFF behaviour. If nil then they are left in the buffer, which may aid debugging.
woman-preserve-ascii
A boolean value. If non-nil then preserve ASCII characters in the WoMan buffer. Otherwise, non-ASCII characters (that display as ASCII) may remain, which is irrelevant unless the buffer is to be saved to a file. Default is nil.
woman-emulation
WoMan emulation, currently either NROFF or TROFF. Default is NROFF. TROFF emulation is experimental and largely untested.

Node:Faces, Next:, Previous:Formatting Options, Up:Customization

Faces

These options control the display faces that WoMan uses to format the man page.

woman-fontify
A boolean value. If non-nil then WoMan assumes that face support is available. It defaults to a non-nil value if the display supports either colours or different fonts.
woman-italic-face
Face for italic font in man pages. Default: italic, underlined, foreground red. This is overkill! TROFF uses just italic; NROFF uses just underline. You should probably select either italic or underline as you prefer, but not both, although italic and underline work together perfectly well!
woman-bold-face
Face for bold font in man pages. Default: bold, foreground blue.
woman-unknown-face
Face for all unknown fonts in man pages. Default: foreground brown. Brown is a good compromise: it is distinguishable from the default but not enough so as to make font errors look terrible. (Files that use non-standard fonts seem to do so badly or in idiosyncratic ways!)
woman-addition-face
Face for all additions made by WoMan to man pages. Default: foreground orange.

Node:Special symbols, Previous:Faces, Up:Customization

Special symbols

This section currently applies only to Microsoft Windows.

WoMan provides partial experimental support for special symbols, initially only for MS-Windows and only for MS-Windows fonts. This includes both non-ASCII characters from the main text font and use of a separate symbol font. Later, support will be added for other font types (e.g. bdf fonts) and for the X Window System. In Emacs 20.7, the current support works partially under Windows 9x but may not work on any other platform.

woman-use-extended-font
A boolean value. If non-nil then WoMan may use non-ASCII characters from the default font. Default is t.
woman-use-symbol-font
A boolean value. If non-nil then WoMan may use the symbol font. Default is nil, mainly because it may change the line spacing (at least in NTEmacs 20).
woman-symbol-font
A string describing the symbol font to use for special characters. It should be compatible with, and the same size as, the default text font. Under MS-Windows, the default is 
"-*-Symbol-normal-r-*-*-*-*-96-96-p-*-ms-symbol"

Node:Log, Next:, Previous:Customization, Up:Top

The *WoMan-Log* Buffer

This is modelled on the Emacs byte-compiler. It logs all files formatted by WoMan and the time taken. If WoMan finds anything that it cannot handle then it writes a warning to this buffer. If the variable woman-show-log is non-nil (by default it is nil) then WoMan automatically displays this buffer. See Interface Options. Many WoMan warnings can be completely ignored, because they are reporting the fact that WoMan has ignored requests that it is correct for WoMan to ignore. In some future version this level of paranoia may be reduced, but not until WoMan is deemed more reliable. At present, all warnings should be treated with some suspicion. Uninterpreted escape sequences are also logged (in some cases).

By resetting the variable woman-ignore to nil (by default it is t), uninterpreted ROFF requests can optionally be left in the formatted buffer to indicate precisely where they occurred. See Interface Options.

Node:Technical, Next:, Previous:Log, Up:Top

Technical Details

Horizontal and vertical spacing and resolution

WoMan currently assumes 10 characters per inch horizontally, hence a horizontal resolution of 24 basic units, and 5 lines per inch vertically, hence a vertical resolution of 48 basic units. (NROFF uses 240 per inch.)

Vertical spacing and blank lines

The number of consecutive blank lines in the formatted buffer should be either 0 or 1. A blank line should leave a space like .sp 1. Current policy is to output vertical space only immediately before text is output.

Node:Bugs, Next:, Previous:Technical, Up:Top

Reporting Bugs

If WoMan fails completely, or formats a file incorrectly (i.e. obviously wrongly or significantly differently from man) or inelegantly, then please

  1. check that you are running the latest version of woman.el available from my web site, and
  2. check that the problem is not already described in the file woman.status, also available from my web site.

If both of the above are true then please email me the entry from the *WoMan-Log* buffer relating to the problem file, together with a brief description of the problem. Please indicate where you got the man source file from, but do not send it to me unless I ask you to! Thanks. (At present WoMan has no automated bug-reporting facility.)

Node:Acknowledgements, Next:, Previous:Bugs, Up:Top

Acknowledgements

For Heather, Kathryn and Madelyn, the women in my life (although they will probably never use it)!

I also thank the following for helpful suggestions, bug reports, code fragments, general interest, etc.:

Jari Aalto, jari.aalto@cs.tpu.fi
Dean Andrews, dean@dra.com
Juanma Barranquero, barranquero@laley-actualidad.es
Karl Berry, kb@cs.umb.edu
Jim Chapman, jchapman@netcomuk.co.uk
Frederic Corne, frederic.corne@erli.fr
Peter Craft, craft@alacritech.com
Charles Curley, ccurley@trib.com
Jim Davidson, jdavidso@teknowledge.com
Kevin D'Elia, Kevin.DElia@mci.com
John Fitch, jpff@maths.bath.ac.uk
Hans Frosch, jwfrosch@rish.b17c.ingr.com
Guy Gascoigne-Piggford, ggp@informix.com
Brian Gorka, gorkab@sanchez.com
Nicolai Henriksen, nhe@lyngso-industri.dk
Thomas Herchenroeder, the@software-ag.de
Alexander Hinds, ahinds@thegrid.net
Stefan Hornburg, sth@hacon.de
Theodore Jump, tjump@cais.com
Paul Kinnucan, paulk@mathworks.com
Jonas Linde, jonas@init.se
Andrew McRae, andrewm@optimation.co.nz
Howard Melman, howard@silverstream.com
Dennis Pixton, dennis@math.binghamton.edu
T. V. Raman, raman@Adobe.com
Bruce Ravel, bruce.ravel@nist.gov
Benjamin Riefenstahl, benny@crocodial.de
Kevin Ruland, kruland@seistl.com
Tom Schutter, tom@platte.com
Wei-Xue Shi, wxshi@ma.neweb.ne.jp
Fabio Somenzi, fabio@joplin.colorado.edu
Karel Sprenger, ks@ic.uva.nl
Chris Szurgot, szurgot@itribe.net
Paul A. Thompson, pat@po.cwru.edu
Arrigo Triulzi, arrigo@maths.qmw.ac.uk
Geoff Voelker, voelker@cs.washington.edu
Eli Zaretskii, eliz@is.elta.co.il

Node:Command Index, Next:, Previous:Acknowledgements, Up:Top

Command Index

Node:Variable Index, Next:, Previous:Command Index, Up:Top

Variable Index

Node:Keystroke Index, Next:, Previous:Variable Index, Up:Top

Keystroke Index

Node:Concept Index, Previous:Keystroke Index, Up:Top

Concept Index