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 ?

possible duplicate of [Using Emacs for $PAGER?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8406721/using-emacs-for-pager) — phils, May 17 '12 at 22:39

Klaus · Answer 1 · 2012-05-18T06:47:48.027

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.

choroba · Answer 2 · 2021-01-18T09:06:23.807

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.

edited Jan 18 '21 at 09:06

answered May 18 '12 at 00:38

choroba

231,213
25
204
289

3

Also worth considering: `emacs -eval "(woman \"$1\")"`, which uses emacs' elisp based man instead of the external man program. – ataylor May 18 '12 at 20:48
@ataylor This opens the man buffer as a popup, how can I maximize it (in the script, of course)? – HappyFace Jul 15 '19 at 08:34
@YoujunHu: What do you mean by "does not work"? What error do you get? It works for me. – choroba Jan 18 '21 at 09:05
@choroba : The error I got: symbol's function defintion is void: $man\ \"find"$ – Youjun Hu Jan 18 '21 at 13:29
The version that works for me: `emacs -nw --eval '(progn (man "'$1'") (delete-window))';` – Youjun Hu Jan 18 '21 at 13:31
another working version: `emacs -nw --eval "(progn (man \"$1\") (delete-window))"` – Youjun Hu Jan 18 '21 at 13:32

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 04:21

3

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

edited May 23 '17 at 04:21

Stefan

27,908
4
53
82

answered Jul 24 '13 at 07:45

Youjun Hu

991
6
18

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

3 Answers3