posts/2013/03/10/view-man-pages-with-preview-on-mac-os-x/

[giscus[bot]]

posts/2013/03/10/view-man-pages-with-preview-on-mac-os-x/

I am always looking for better ways to integrate the unix components into Mac OS X. I recently came across a great way to connect the man pages to a more visual mode in OS X.

https://www.devopsderek.com/posts/2013/03/10/view-man-pages-with-preview-on-mac-os-x/

[derektamsen]

Nice! A lot easier to read. Thanks!

flackend

[derektamsen]

Cool, I use gman() { ( yelp "man:$1" & ); } on Gnome/Linux, and was looking for a similar tool on OSX.

forivall

[derektamsen]

EDIT
my original script had a gotcha: if the man page was not found it would hang 😵‍💫
This is now more resilient:

pman () {
setopt LOCAL_OPTIONS ERR_RETURN PIPE_FAIL
local _file && _file=(`man -w ${@}`) && mandoc -Tpdf $_file | open -f -a Preview
}

Original comment
In Mac OS X Ventura this is no longer working; blame Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-il/HT213250
But found this superuser post about pstopdf: https://superuser.com/questions/1769824/is-there-a-macos-command-line-tool-for-converting-eps-or-ps-files-to-pdf
And this about background jobs in zsh: https://superuser.com/questions/1228411/silent-background-jobs-in-zsh

Putting it all together we get this revised script:
It creates a temporary named-pipe, writes the pdf page to it (in a subprocess), cats it into Preview.app and removes it:

pman () {
setopt LOCAL_OPTIONS NO_MONITOR
trap 'rm -f $_fifo' EXIT && _fifo=`mktemp -ut $@[#]`  && mkfifo $_fifo && man -t ${@} | pstopdf -o $_fifo &
cat $_fifo | open -f -a /System/Applications/Preview.app/
}

ophershachar