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BBEtter Manpages

This is a small BBEdit package for making BBEdit nice to use as your manpage reader, inspired by and extended from Dr. Drang's bman. Dr. Drang's post also does a good job of explaining why you might want this.

Double-click BBEtter-Manpages.bbpackage in the Finder to install. Alternatively, you can copy or symlink it into ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Packages, or wherever your BBEdit Application Support folder is. If you do this manually you'll need to restart BBEdit for it to detect the package.

Contents

  1. A codeless language module whose primary purpose is to allow BBEdit to identify the headings in a rendered manpage so that they can be indexed in the function popup, for easier navigation of very long manpages.

    The CLM also provides extremely minimal syntax colouring: it attempts to identify quoted commands and colour them as strings. The nature of a rendered manpage is such that it's very hard to tell the difference between a command example and a paragraph of text, so expect edge cases not to be detected.

    Digits in the manpage will also be coloured, because that's BBEdit's default behaviour when syntax-colouring is on. There doesn't appear to be any way to turn this off except by globally editing your colour scheme.

  1. A script you can set as your $MANPAGER in your shell so manpages open in BBEdit. (In other words: you type man awk, you get a BBEdit window with the awk manpage in it.) Unsurprisingly, this requires you to have installed the BBEdit command line tools (BBEdit > Install Command Line Tools…).

    To use the script, put the following in your .bashrc:

    if [ -z "$SSH_CONNECTION" ]; then
    export MANPAGER=<path_to_this_package>/BBetter-Manpages.bbpackage/bbman.sh
fi

    In theory this should also work in a .zshrc but I haven’t tested it.

    If you use fish (like me) instead put the following in .config/fish/config.fish:

    if status is-interactive
and test -z $SSH_CONNECTION
    set -xg MANPAGER <path_to_this_package>/BBetter-Manpages.bbpackage/bbman.fish
end

    The fishy version uses fish's string builtins instead of all the painful mucking about with sed and tr.

    The if guards prevent setting BBEdit as your $MANPAGER if you're connected via ssh and thus BBEdit can't run. (With thanks to this Stack Exchange question.)