Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[vp]

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Binding over the system manual path is a nice Plan 9™ code avoidance
tactic, which got tired really quickly for me during some sources
expeditions.

My solution was adding the -f flag to the man(1) utility which
disables the searching behaviour and treats the arguments as paths to
the troff source files, for example:

	man -f /sys/man/1/man 
	
The resulting diff is weird to look at since I've hoisted a big chunk
of code into a function, so I attach the whole script instead.

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#!/bin/rc
# man - print manual pages
rfork e

. /sys/man/fonts

out=cat
search=yes
cmd=n
sec=()
files=()

fn usage {
	echo 'Usage: man [-bfnpPStw] [section ...] title ...' >[1=2]
	exit
}

fn roff {
	preproc=()
	postproc=cat
	x=`{doctype $2}
	if (~ $1 t){
		opts=-Tutf
		if(~ $x *grap*)
			preproc=($preproc grap)
		if(~ $x *pic*)
			preproc=($preproc pic)
	}
	if not{
		opts='-N -rL1000i'
		if (grep -s '^\.(2C|sp *[0-9]*\.)' $2)
			postproc=col
	}
	if(~ $x *eqn*)
		preproc=($preproc eqn)
	if(~ $x *tbl*)
		preproc=($preproc tbl)
	preproc=`{echo $preproc | sed 's/ /|/g'}
	if(~ $#preproc 0)
		preproc=cat
	{echo -n $FONTS | cat $2} | eval $preproc | troff $opts -$MAN | $postproc
}

fn doman {
	cmd=$1; shift
	for(i){
		switch($cmd){
		case w
			echo $i
		case t
			roff t $i
		case p
			roff t $i | grep -v '^x X html'
		case P
			roff t $i
		case n
			roff n $i | sed '
				${
       				       /^$/p
				}
				//N
				/^\n$/D'
		case b
			x=`{echo $i | sed 's;/sys/man/(.*)/(.*);\1 \2;'}
			if(~ $x(2) 0intro) x=($x(1) intro)
			roff n $i | sed '
				${
       				       /^$/p
				}
				//N
				/^\n$/D' |
			plumb -i -d edit -a 'action=showdata filename=/man/'$x(2)^'('$x(1)^')'
		}
	} | $out
}

d=no
while(~ $d no){
	if(~ $#* 0) usage
	if(test -d /sys/man/$1){
		sec=($sec $1)
		shift
	}
	if not
		switch($1){
		case -b ; cmd=b ; shift
		case -f ; search=file ; shift
		case -n ; cmd=n ; shift
		case -P ; cmd=P ; out=page ; shift
		case -p ; cmd=p ; out=proof ; shift
		case -S ; search=no ; shift
		case -t ; cmd=t ; shift
		case -w ; cmd=w ; shift
		case * ; d=yes
		}
}
if(~ $#* 0) usage

if(~ $search file){
	doman $cmd $*
	exit
}
if(~ $#sec 0)
	sec=`{ls -pd /sys/man/[0-9]*}
if(~ $search yes){
	pat='^('^`{echo $* | sed 's/ /|/g'}^') '
	for(i in /sys/man/$sec)
		if(/bin/test -f $i/INDEX){
			try=`{grep -i $pat $i/INDEX | sed 's/^[^ ]* //' | sort -u}
			if(! ~ $#try 0)
				files=($files $i/$try)
		}
}
if(~ $#files 0)
	for(i){
		if(~ $i intro) i=0intro
		for(n in $sec){
			try=`{echo /sys/man/$n/$i | tr A-Z a-z}
			if (/bin/test -f $try)
				files=($files $try)
		}
	}
if(~ $#files 0){
	echo 'man: no manual page' >[1=2]
	exit 'no man'
}
doman $cmd $files

Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[Stanley Lieber]

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     when you get tired of doing something manually, put it in a script. when you get tired of running the script manually, add it to your profile, or to another script that you’ll be running anyway. when all that fails, program the shell interactively! making all this easy is a major feature of the system.  

  
i do a lot of stuff (maybe too much) in my profile, and in other scripts that run when i setup network mounts or launch rio (both are separate and are triggered manually); everything from polluting my environment with tons of utility variables (mainly, shorthand for various frequently used long path names) and functions, to binding all kinds of local and remote directories over non-standard locations. it eases the need for a lot of otherwise necessary code. thankfully, the plan 9 tools don’t care, and are happy to go on with their work while remaining completely ignorant of how i’ve wrecked the place.
  

  
here’s a completely unrelated example of this way of thinking:
  

  
since there is no shell completion in rio, i’m constantly creating tiny, single-character variables (mostly containing the results of shell globbing) so that i can manipulate those values in various ways without having to type out long strings of characters. this comes in very handy when (for instance) running a disgusting app ->  ssh ->  tmux ->  drawterm -G rube goldberg connection to plan 9 from a touchscreen mobile device.
  

  
what i’m advocating here may seem like simply transplanting effort from automation over to your consciousness, and therefore wasting more of your precious mental processing capabilities (read: limited and already stretched attention span), but consider that in many cases you’d have to decide things like which flag to invoke, how to use it, and its proper arguments anyway.
  

  
and code that doesn’t exist never fails.
  

  
sl
  

     

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Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[Silas McCroskey]

Couldn't you also just `nroff -man' directly and avoid `man' altogether?

What is `man' really buying you here, if you're not searching the index?

- sam-d

On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 7:10 AM Stanley Lieber <sl@stanleylieber.com> wrote:
>
> when you get tired of doing something manually, put it in a script. when you get tired of running the script manually, add it to your profile, or to another script that you’ll be running anyway. when all that fails, program the shell interactively! making all this easy is a major feature of the system.
>
> i do a lot of stuff (maybe too much) in my profile, and in other scripts that run when i setup network mounts or launch rio (both are separate and are triggered manually); everything from polluting my environment with tons of utility variables (mainly, shorthand for various frequently used long path names) and functions, to binding all kinds of local and remote directories over non-standard locations. it eases the need for a lot of otherwise necessary code. thankfully, the plan 9 tools don’t care, and are happy to go on with their work while remaining completely ignorant of how i’ve wrecked the place.
>
> here’s a completely unrelated example of this way of thinking:
>
> since there is no shell completion in rio, i’m constantly creating tiny, single-character variables (mostly containing the results of shell globbing) so that i can manipulate those values in various ways without having to type out long strings of characters. this comes in very handy when (for instance) running a disgusting app -> ssh -> tmux -> drawterm -G rube goldberg connection to plan 9 from a touchscreen mobile device.
>
> what i’m advocating here may seem like simply transplanting effort from automation over to your consciousness, and therefore wasting more of your precious mental processing capabilities (read: limited and already stretched attention span), but consider that in many cases you’d have to decide things like which flag to invoke, how to use it, and its proper arguments anyway.
>
> and code that doesn’t exist never fails.
>
> sl
>

Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[Stanley Lieber]

as someone who recently had to edit the man pages for print, i do heartily recommend proofing changes with man -P before committing.

sl

Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[umbraticus]

> Couldn't you also just `nroff -man' directly and avoid `man' altogether?
> What is `man' really buying you here, if you're not searching the index?

man does some extra work to remove nroff's pagination, but yeah...

umbraticus

Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[vp]

It only took me a weekend and a nudge to realize that:

	troff -man manual.man | page

is all I need.

Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[ori]

>      Can’t you just bind your work directory over /sys/man/[n]?  

Point.

Forget that patch, then.

Re: [9front] Manpage Previews

[Stanley Lieber]

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     Can’t you just bind your work directory over /sys/man/[n]?  

  
sl
  

     

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