Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
26 lines (20 loc) · 1.21 KB

File metadata and controls

26 lines (20 loc) · 1.21 KB

View Manpages With More Color Using Bat

The default pager (program for display large text documents) for manpages is less. That is, when I run something like man git-log, I am starting a less process for viewing that document and I have access to all the features and keybindings of less.

A comparable alternative to less is bat which support manpage-specific syntax highlighting. With the -p flag, bat uses plain styling which removes the extra formatting. With the -l flag I can set the language for syntax highlighting to man.

❯ MANPAGER="bat -plman" man git-log

That's a nice way to experiment with using bat as the man pager, but if I want it set longterm I should add that env var setting for MANPAGER to my shell config or dotfiles.

While bat is an improvement with the color that it sprinkles in, I am going to stick with neovim as my configured manpage viewer. Neovim gives me a similar level of color plus a lot of other really nice features that only an editor could provide.

source