How to view man pages using emacs when invoking man command in command line?

Question

I would like to view man pages using emacs when invoking man command. I modified the pager parameter in /etc/man.conf PAGER to emacs.

But, it doesn't work. Is there anything I should modify ?

Apparently

possible duplicate of Using Emacs for $PAGER? – Catadromous

Answer 1

Indeed, emacs cannot read STDIN into a buffer, meaning

cat foobar | emacs

does not work in any case. So setting your PAGER variable to 'emacs', or 'emacs -nw' does not do the job. Only way around I see is to write the man output into a tmp-file and then load that file into emacs:

man find > tmp-file; emacs tmp-file

You could alias this. For example, assuming a tc-shell, and a directory called 'tmp' in your home-path, you can put the following line into your ~/.tcshrc file:

alias man '/usr/bin/man \!* > ~/tmp/tmp-file; emacs ~/tmp/tmp-file; rm ~/tmp/tmp-file'

So next time you call man find, emacs will fire up.

Yuri

Answer 2

Emacs has a "Man mode", which can be invoked by M-x man RET and then typing in your command.

Caesarean

Answer 3

You can profit from emacs's function man. Just define a function in bash that will run emacs that will call it:

function man () {
    emacs -e '(man "'"$1"'")'
}

You might want to call emacs -nw or even emacsclient instead.

Halsey

Also worth considering: emacs -eval "(woman \"$1\")", which uses emacs' elisp based man instead of the external man program. – Hemispheroid

@Hemispheroid This opens the man buffer as a popup, how can I maximize it (in the script, of course)? – Burdett

@YoujunHu: What do you mean by "does not work"? What error do you get? It works for me. – Halsey

@Halsey : The error I got: symbol's function defintion is void: (man\ \"find") – Caesarean

The version that works for me: emacs -nw --eval '(progn (man "'$1'") (delete-window))'; – Caesarean

another working version: emacs -nw --eval "(progn (man \"$1\") (delete-window))" – Caesarean