implemented in John Ousterhout's Tcl 7.5/Tk 4.1, icon drawn by Rei Shinozuka
Compatible with Sun Solaris, SunOS, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, OSF/1 aka Digital UNIX, DEC
Ultrix, AT&T System V, SGI IRIX, Linux, SCO, IBM AIX, FreeBSD, BSDI
-- each of which, believe you me, is in some way different from all the others
Copyright © 1993-1996 Thomas A. Phelps
All Rights Reserved.
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Computer Science Division
The latest version of TkMan is always available by anonymous
Before reporting a bug, first check the home site to make sure you're using the latest version of TkMan. If you send me bug reports and/or suggestions for new features, include your MANPATH, the versions of TkMan, Tcl, Tk, X, and UNIX, your machine and X window manager names, the edited Makefile, a copy of your ~/.tkman file, and the first few lines of the tkman executable. Otherwise don't waste my time.
"I encourage you to use TkMan for reading man pages. ... TkMan provides an extremely pleasant GUI for browsing man pages. I cannot describe all the nice features of TkMan in this small space. Instead I will merely say that I now actually look forward to reading man pages as long as I can do it with TkMan."
-- Don Libes, Exploring Expect, page 21
A graphical manual page browser, TkMan offers two major advantages over
Other features include:
* full text search of manual pages (with Glimpse; optional)
* when multiple pages match the search name, a pulldown list of all matches
* regular expression searches for manual page names
* a list of recently added or changed manual pages
* a "history" list of the most recently visited pages
* a preferences panel to control fonts, colors, and other system settings
* compatibility with compressed pages (both as source and formatted)
* diagnostics on your manual page installation
* elision of those unsightly page headers and footers
* and, when attempting to print a page available only in formatted form,
reverse compilation into [tn]roff source,
which can then be reformatted as good-looking PostScript.
This help page is shipped with the distribution in HTML form for easy printing.
There are several ways to specify the manual page you desire. You
can type its name into the entry box at the top of the screen and
press Return or click the man button. The name may be just the name of
the command or may end with .n or (n),
where n specifies in which section to look. Man pages are
matched using regular expressions, so you can use . to match
any single character, * to match any (zero or more) of the
previous regular expression, [ .. ] to match any
single character in the enclosed class; see
Usually TkMan searches the colon-separated list of directories in your
apropos information is available by typing the name and clicking apropos or hitting Shift-Return. The output of apropos is piped through sort and uniq to remove duplicates. To pass the matches through additional filters, simply give the pipe as in a shell, e.g., `search | grep ^g' (each space character is significant) returns all the search-related commands which begin with the letter g. The results of the last apropos query are available under the Volumes menu.
If it's installed, you will
see a button for glimpse, a full text search program that
requires only small index files ("typically 2-5% the size of the
original text" but larger percentages for smaller amounts of text),
written by Udi Manber, Sun Wu, and Burra Gopal of
the University of Arizona's Department of Computer Science. In their
performance measurements, "a search for Schwarzkopf allowing two
misspelling errors in 5600 files occupying 77MB took 7 seconds on a
SUN IPC". For example, one may search for the string `WWW' anywhere in any manual page
by typing in `WWW' in the entry line at the top of the
screen and clicking on the glimpse button
or typing Meta-Return.
Escape and C-g can interrupt a search after the
current directory is done.
To employ glimpse's command line options, simply
place them before the search pattern in the entry box, or add them to
the default options by editing the man(glimpse) variable in
your ~/.tkman startup file (see Customizing TkMan, below).
For instance, to search for "perl" as a word and not part of another
word (as in "properly"), glimpse for -w perl.
Glimpse supports an AND operation denoted by the symbol
`;' and an OR operation denoted by the symbol
`,'.
Refer to the
The Paths pulldown gives you complete control over which directory hierarchies of
your
Whenever you have a man page name in the text display box, whether from apropos, a volume listing or a reference within another man page, you can click on it to hypertext-jump to it. In point of fact, man pages do not explicitly code man page references, but words that are especially likely to be references are distinguished, though any word may be clicked on to treat it as a man page reference. Pressing shift while clicking opens up a new viewer box to display the page.
The last few man pages you looked at can be accessed directly through the History pulldown menu. The list is sorted top to bottom in order of increasing time since that page was last visited. Shortcuts lists your personal favorites and is used just like History, with the additional options of adding the current man page (by clicking +) or removing it (-) from the list. A shift-click on - removes all shortcuts.
(Man pages specified as above are processed through an nroff filter. TkMan can also read raw text from a file or from a command pipeline, which can then be read, searched and highlighted same as a man page. To read from a file, make the first character in the name a <, as in <~/foo.txt. To open a pipe, make the first character a | (vertical bar), as in `|gzcat foo.txt.gz' or `|cat ../foo.txt | grep bar' (that's no space after the first |, a space before and after any subsequent ones). After reading a file in this way, the current directory is set to its directory. Commands are not processed by a shell, but the metacharacters ., .., ~ and $ (for environment variables), are expanded nonetheless. Typing is eased further by file name completion, bound to Escape. Lone files (i.e., not part of a pipe) are automatically uncompressed--no need to read compressed files through a zcat pipe. It is not expected that reading raw text will be done much; it is included so the occasional non-man page documentation, say, a FAQ or RFC, may be read from the same environment.)
The full pathname of the current manual page is shown at the top of
the screen. Via the Preferences dialog, this can be changed to the
To the extent it follows conventional formatting, a manual page is parsed to yield its
section and subsection titles (which are directly available from the
Sections pulldown) and references to other man pages from throughout the page
including its
Within a man page or raw text file or pipe, you may add ad hoc highlighting, as though with a yellow marker (underlining on monochrome monitors). Highlighted regions may then be scrolled to directly through the Highlights pulldown menu. To highlight a region, select the desired text by clicking button 1, dragging to the far extent of the desired region and releasing the button, then click on the + next to Highlights. To remove any highlights or portions thereof in a region, select it as before but then click on -. A shift-click on the menu title tours through all the highlights on the page. A shift-click on - removes all highlights on the page. A complete set of pages with highlighting is available under the Volumes menu.
Highlighting information is robust against changes to and reformatting of the page. Thus you can justify expending some effort in marking up pages with the knowledge that if a man page does change, as when the corresponding software pagkage and its documentation are updated, TkMan will try to reposition them to the corresponding positions in the new pages. Here's how highlight reattachment works. When you highlight a region, the starting and ending positions are saved along with some the content of the highlighted region and context. When that page is viewed again, if those positions still match the context, the highlight is attached there (this is an exact match). If not, the context is searched forward and backward for a match, with the closer match chosen if there are matches in both directions (a repositioned match). If no match is found with the full context, gradually less and less of it is tried, reasoning that perhaps the content of the context has been changed (repositioned, but with less confidence, triggering a warning dialog). If still no match is found (an orphan), the highlight is reported at the bottom of the page, where it must be reattached manually before leaving the page or it will be forgotten. (With TkMan v1.8b3 and earlier, highlights were attached by positions only, and when the page modification date changed, the user had the choice of applying highlights at those same positions regardless of the text there now or throwing out the highlights wholesale. Old style highlights are automatically updated to the new style that can be automatically and robustly repositioned. The next time an old style page is viewed, the old style highlights are applied as before, and from those postions new style highlights are composed.) The annotation reattachment mechanism is inspired by Stanford's ComMentor system.
You can move about the man page by using the scrollbar or typing a number of key combinations familiar to Emacs aficionados. Space and C-v page down; delete and M-v page up. (vi fans will be happy to hear that C-f and C-b also page down and page up, respectively.) C-n and C-p scroll up and down, respectively, by a single line. M-< goes to the top and M-> to the bottom of the text. One may "scan" the page, which is to say scroll it up and down with the mouse but without the use of the scrollbar, by dragging on the text display with the middle mouse button pressed. Like Emacs, C-space will mark one's current location, which can be returned to later with C-x, which exchanges the then-current position with the saved mark; a second C-x swaps back.
C-s initiates an incremental search. Subsequently typing a few letters attempts to find
a line with that string, starting its search at the current match, if any,
or otherwise the topmost visible line.
A second C-s finds the next match of the string typed
so far. (If the current search string is empty, a second C-s retrieves the
previous search pattern.) C-r is similar to C-s but searches backwards.
Escape or C-g cancels searching.
Incremental search can be used to
quickly locate a particular command-line option or a particular command in
a group (as in csh's long list of internal commands).
At the bottom of the screen, type in a regular
expression to search for (see Tcl's
The Tab key moves the focus from the man page type-in line to the text view of the man page to the search line and back around. Shift-Tab jumps about in the opposite direction.
The Occasionals menu holds commands and options which you probably won't use
frequently. Help returns to this
information screen. Although virtually made obsolete by TkMan, Kill Trees
makes a printout of the current man page on dead, cut, bleached trees, helping to starve the
planet of life-giving oxygen. A list of printers appears in the cascade menu; this
list may be edited in Preferences/Misc. (Even if only one printer is available,
it placed in the cascade menu, rather than being directly available. This is a feature.)
(If the [tn]roff source is not available, TkMan
asks if it should try to reverse compile the man page. If successful, this
produces much more appealing output than an
As with xman one may instantiate multiple viewers. When there is more than
one viewer you may choose man pages in one viewer and have their contents
shown in another. Use the Output pulldown (which appears and disappears
as relevant) to direct one viewer's output destination to another. With
this feature one may easily compare two similar man pages for differences,
keep one man page always visible, or examine several man pages from a
particular volume listing or a
TkMan uses a database of all manual page names in searching for a
match for a particular name. This database is constructed
automatically if it doesn't exist (this includes the first time TkMan
is run for a particular user) and whenever it is out of date due to
pages being added or changed, or changes in one's
When exited via the Quit button, TkMan saves its state. One may guard against losing highlighting, shortcuts and other would-be persistent information without quitting by by invoking Checkpoint state to .tkman; Quit, don't update performs the opposite operation.
At the bottom right corner of the screen, Mono toggles between the proportionally-spaced font and a monospaced one, for use in those man pages that rely on a fixed-width font to align columns. Quit exits TkMan, of course, after saving some state information (see below). To exit without saving status information, select the Quit option from the Occasionals pulldown.
The Preferences... choice in the Occasionals pulldown menu brings up a graphical user interface to setting various attributes of TkMan, including fonts, colors, and icons. Click on a checkbutton at the top of the window to bring up the corresponding group of choices. After making a set of choices, the Apply button reconfigures the running application to show these changes, OK sets the changes for use now and in the future, Cancel quits the dialog and sets all choices to their settings as of the time Preferences was called up, and Defaults resets the settings in the current group to those set by TkMan out of the box.
The first line in the Fonts group specifies the font to use for the general user interface, which amounts to the labels on buttons and the text in menus. The first menu in the line labeled Interface sets the font family, the next menu sets the font size, and the last the font styling (normal, bold, italics, bold-italics). Text display makes these settings for the text box in which the manual page contents are displayed. For listings of all man pages in a particular volume (as chosen with the Volumes menu), you may wish to use a smaller font so that more names fit on the screen at once. Screen DPI specifies the right set of fonts to use for your monitor.
Colors sets the foreground and background colors to use for the manual page text display box, the general user interface, and the buttons of the user interface. In addition it sets the color (or font) in which to show various classes of text in the text box, including manual page references, incremental search hits, regular expression search hits, and highlighted regions.
The See group specifies what information to display. Usually manual page headers and footers are uninteresting and therefore are stripped out, but a canonical header and footer (along the date the page was installed in the man/mann directory or formatted to the man/catn directory) to be shown at the bottom of every page can be requested. Solaris and IRIX systems come with many "subvolumes"--that is volumes with names like "3x" and "4dm" that form subgroupings under the main volumes "3" and "4", respectively--and you make use tkmandesc commands to add your own subvolumes. You can reduce the length of the main Volumes menu by placing all volumes in such groups as cascaded menus. When a highlighted passage is jumped to via the Highlights menu, some number of lines of back context are included; the exact number of lines is configurable. The information bar at the top of the window can display either the short, one-line description from a manual page's NAME section or the pathname of the page. Around the man page display area runs a buffer region of a few pixels, the exact width of which is configurable. Tk deviates from Motif behavior slightly, as for instance in highlighting buttons when they're under the cursor, but you can observe strict Motif behavior.
The Icon group sets all the options relating to iconification. The pathnames of the icon bitmap and icon mask should be the full pathnames (beginning with a `/'). If Path name to icon bitmap is set to (default), the internal icon by Rei Shinozuka will be used.
If a man page has not been formatted by nroff, TkMan must first pipe the source text through nroff. By turing on Cache formatted (nroff'ed) pages in the Misc(ellaneous) group, the nroff-formatted text is saved to disk (if possible), thereby eliminating this time-consuming step the next time the man page is read. The on & compress setting will compress the page, which saves on disk space (often substantially as much of a formatted page is whitespace), but will make it unavailable to other manual pagers that don't handle compression.
By default, man page links are activated by single clicking. If it is changed to double with Mouse click to activate hyperlink, the first click puts the name in the entry box so that it can be used as the apropos or glimpse pattern as well as for man searching. This click once to select, twice to launch follows the Macintosh convention.
TkMan can extract section headers from all manual pages, but only some manual page macros format subsection headers in a way that can be distinguished from ordinary text; if your macros do, turn this option on to add subsections to the Sections menu. The History pulldown must balance depth of the list against ease of finding an entry; set your own inflection point with this menu. Volumes' (recent) choice will show all manual pages that have been added or changed n days, where n is set with this next menu.
Glimpse works best when searching for relatively uncommon words; guard against getting too many hits by setting the maximum number reported. By default Glimpse indexes are placed at the root of the corresponding man hierarchy, where they can be shared. For the case when an individual may not have write permission there, a single, unified index can be created and stored locally (though you lose control of it from Paths settings). Unified indexes are faster than distributed. On the other hand, rebuilding the index generally takes longer, since the distributed version will only have to rebuild the indexes for those directories that changed. For unified indexes and also for "stray cats" (i.e., directories not part of a set of man hierarchy directories), you should specify an auxiliary directory to hold the index.
There are four levels of configuration.
(1) Transparent. Simply use TkMan and it will remember your window size and placement, short cuts, and highlights (if you quit out of TkMan via the Quit button).
(2) Preferences editor (see Preferences above).
(3) Configuration file. Most interesting settings--those in the Preferences dialogs and more not available there--can be changed by editing one's own ~/.tkman file. Thus, a single copy of TkMan (i.e., the executable tkman) can be shared, but each user can have his own customized setup. (The file ~/.tkman is created/rewritten every time one quits TkMan via the Quit button in the lower right corner. Therefore, to get a ~/.tkman to edit, first run and quit TkMan. Do not create one from scratch as it will not have the proper format used for saving other persistent information, and your work will be overwritten, which is to say lost. As well, be careful not to edit a ~/.tkman file only to have it overwritten when a currently running TkMan quits.)
Options that match the defaults are commented out (i.e., preceded by a #). This is so that any changes in TkMan defaults will propagate nicely to end users, while maintaining a list of all interesting variables. To override the default settings for these options, first comment in the line.
The ~/.tkman save file is the place to add or delete colors to the
default set, which will subsequently become menu choices in
Preferences, by editing in place the variable
man(colors). One may also edit the order of Shortcuts
in the man(shortcuts) variable.
Other interesting variables include
man(highlight), which can be edited to change the background
in place of the foreground, or both the foreground and
background, or a color and the font as with the following
setting:
set man(highlight) {bold-italics -background #ffd8ffffb332}
Arbitrary Tcl commands, including tkmandesc commands (described below), can be appended to ~/.tkman (after the ### your additions go below line).
To set absolutely the volume names for which all directories should be
searched, edit the parallel arrays on these existing lines:
set man(manList) ...
set man(manTitleList) ...
Changing the order volumes in these lists (make sure to keep the two lists
in parallel correspondence) changes the precedence of matches when two or
more pages have the same name: the page found in the earlier volume in this list
is show first.
Additional useful commands include
(4) Source code. Of course, but if you make generally useful changes or have suggestions for some, please report them back to me so I may share the wealth with the next release.
Key bindings related to the text display box are kept in the
sb array in ~/.tkman (for more information on Tcl's
arrays, refer to the
Like xman, TkMan gives you directory-by-directory control over named volume contents. Unlike and superior to xman, however, each individual user controls directory-to-volume placement, rather than facing a single specification for each directory tree that must be observed by all.
By default a matrix is created by taking the product of directories in the
The interface to this functionality takes the form of Tcl commands, so you
may need to learn at least pidgin Tcl--particularly the commands that deal with Tcl lists
(including
Directory titles and abbrevations are kept in lists. Abbreviations MUST be unique (capital letters are distinct from lower case), but need not correspond to actual directories. In fact, volume letters specified here supercede the defaults in identifying a volume in man page searches.
The following commands are appended to the file ~/.tkman (see Customizing TkMan, above).
To recreate a cross product of current section lists:
manDescDefaults
This cross product is made implicitly before other tkmandesc commands.
Almost always this is what one expects. If it is not, one may supress the
cross product by setting the variable manx(defaults) to a non-null, non-zero
value before other tkmandesc commands are invoked.
To add "pseudo" sections to the current volume name list, at various positions including
at end of the list, in alphabetical order, or before or after a specific volume:
manDescAddSects list of (letter, title pairs)
or manDescAddSects list of (letter, title) pairs sort
or manDescAddSects list of (letter, title) pairs before sect-letter
or manDescAddSects list of (letter, title) pairs after sect-letter
In manual page searches that produce multiple matches, the page found
in the earlier volume is the one shown by default.
To move/copy/delete/add directories:
manDescMove from-list to-list dir-patterns-list
manDescCopy from-list to-list dir-patterns-list
manDescDelete from-list dir-patterns-list
manDescAdd to-list dir-list
The dir-patterns-list uses the same meta characters as man
page searching (see above). It is matched against
Adding directories with manDescAdd also makes them available to Glimpse for its indexing.
Warning: Moving directories from their natural home slightly impairs searching speed when following a reference within a man page. For instance, say you've moved man pages for X Windows subroutines from their natural home in volume 3 to their own volume called `X'. Following a reference in XButtonEvent to XAnyEvent(3X11) first searches volume 3; not finding it, TkMan searches all volumes and finally finds it in volume X. With no hint to look in volume 3 (as given by the 3X11 suffix), the full volume search would have begun straight away. (Had you clicked in the volume listing for volume X or specified the man page as XButtonEvent.X, volume X would have been searched first, successfully.)
To help debug tkmandesc scripts, invoke manDescShow to dump to stdout the current correspondence of directories to volumes names.
(1) To collect together all man pages in default volumes 2 and 3 in all
directories into a volume called "Programmer Subroutines", add these lines
to the tail of ~/.tkman:
manDescAddSects {{p "Programmer Subroutines"}}
manDescMove {2 3} p *
To place the new section at the same position in the volume pulldown list
as volumes 2 and 3:
manDescAddSects {{p "Programmer Subroutines"}} after 2
manDescMove {2 3} p *
To move only a selected set of directories:
manDescAddSects {{p "Programmer Subroutines"}}
manDescMove * p {/usr/man/man2 /usr/local/man/man3}
(2) To have a separate volume with all of your and a friend's personal man
pages, keeping a duplicate in their default locations:
manDescAddSects {{t "Man Pages de Tom"} {b "Betty Page(s)"}}
manDescCopy *phelps* t *
manDescCopy *page* t *
(3) To collect the X windows man pages into two sections of their own, one
for programmer subroutines and another for the others:
manDescAddSects {{x "X Windows"}} after 1
manDescAddSects {{X "X Subroutines"}} after 3
manDescMove * x *X11*
manDescMove x X *3
(4) If you never use the programmer subroutines, why not
save time and memory by not reading them into the database?
manDescDelete * {*[2348]} (braces prevent Tcl from trying to execute [2348] as a command)
Alternatively but not equivalently:
manDescDelete {2 3 4 8} *
TkMan's tkmandesc capability is patterned after xman's mandesc files. By placing a mandesc file at the root of a man page directory tree, one may create pseudo volumes and move and copy subdirectories into them. Silicon Graphics has modified xman so that simply by creating a subdirectory in a regular man subdirectory one creates a new volume. This is evil. It violates the individual user's rights to arrange the directory-volume mapping as he pleases, as the mandesc file or subdirectory that spontaneously creates a volume is must be observed by all who read that directory. By contrast, TkMan places the directory-to-volume mapping control in an individual's own ~/.tkman file. This gives the individual complete control and inflicts no pogrom on others who share man page directories. Therefore, mandesc files are not supported in any way by TkMan.
One may still share custom setups, however, by sharing the relevant lines of ~/.tkman. In fact, a tkmandesc version of the standard SGI man page directory setup is included in the contrib directory of the TkMan distribution. For assistance with SGI-specific directory manipulation, contact Paul Raines (raines@slac.stanford.edu).
I estimate that fully 75% of my time writing TkMan has been spent not in adding new features but in supporting all the many, seemingly gratuitous differences in the various flavors of UNIX. Amazingly, each is different from every other. TkMan confronts variations in man page organization, that is, directory structure. The same percentage holds for RosettaMan, which deals with variations in the formatting of the pages themselves, things like what character sequence indicates italics and what do page headers and footers look like. The result of all this work is that you can do a simple installation of TkMan and it will embrace the specifics of your system's manual page installation.
Here's the classical organization. The MANPATH environment variable gives a colon-separated list of directory paths, each of which usually but not necessarily ends in a subdirectory named `man'. In each of these directories, the file `whatis' has a line per man page giving its name and a single line description taken from each page's NAME section. Subdirectories named man[1-9oln] hold the [tn]roff source, and corresponding subdirectories named cat[1-9oln] cache formatted pages. Within subdirectories, each page given as name.section-number, for example "ls.1". The page source should always be available; formatted versions are purely optional, and strictly used as a performance enhancement, saving formatting time at runtime. (Pages that exist in formatted versions only are known as "stray cats".) Man pages may be compressed, with the type of compression given by a suffix on the file. Compression can be particularly successful on formatted pages, which contain long strings of spaces.
Here are all the ways that I can recall that various flavors of UNIX have "improved" the classical organization. Each is supported by TkMan. Clearly TkMan can do all that it does without reliance on any extension beyond the classical organization, so how important were these extensions?
SunOS
Solaris
Ultrix
OSF/1 aka Digital UNIX
HP/UX
SCO
FreeBSD
Linux
BSDI
IBM AIX
SGI Irix - absolute worst by far
TkMan uses RosettaMan to translate and reformat man pages (see
Tom Phelps
developed at the
University of California, Berkeley
Computer Science Division
phelps@ACM.org
Two Years with TkMan, a retrospective paper that uses TkMan as an example for various techniques for writing faster and more robust Tcl/Tk programs, was named Best Paper of the 1995 Tcl/Tk Workshop.
A Berkeley Computer Science Division technical report (CSD-94-802) that is a version of the X Resource article before it was butchered by the editors and the latter paper are available from my World Wide Web page at http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/.
TkMan
Copyright (C) 1993-1996 Thomas A. Phelps (phelps@ACM.org)
All Rights Reserved.
Permission to incorporate this software into commercial products may be obtained from the Office of Technology Licensing, 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 510, Berkeley, CA 94704.
Help page last revised on $Date: 1996/11/07 23:11:49 $