WoMan

WoMan allows UN*X manual pages to be browsed Without Man (or any other external programs) and is distributed with GNU Emacs 21.  This package is still under (sporadic) development, and feedback is welcome.  WoMan is intended to be independent of any specific platform, although I develop and use it with NTEmacs under Microsoft Windows (currently NT and XP) and it includes some specific support for Cygwin.  It should find standard man pages without the need for any special customization.

A snapshot of my latest stable version of WoMan (version 0.551) as submitted to the FSF is available here as woman.el (or woman.el.gz) and the main changes since the version distributed with GNU Emacs 21.1 are available in the ChangeLog (or ChangeLog.gz) file.  It was developed and tested with the latest pretest version of GNU Emacs 21.  It should normally also work with the latest public release version of GNU Emacs but possibly not with any earlier version.  (There is currently no explicit support for XEmacs.)

The following applies to WoMan 0.54, which should run with GNU Emacs 20.3 onwards.

The WoMan user guide can be browsed here as either html or pdf.  The file woman.status provides a status report on the performance of WoMan on a variety of man files.  Texinfo documentation souce and the formatted info files are included among the distributed files, which can all be accessed individually, both uncompressed and gzipped, via a directory listing.  The complete distribution file set (woman.{el,html,info*,pdf,status,texinfo}) is also available as a single gzipped tar file.