mman - My MANual

mman is a small tool like the Unix' man, but instead of accessing the system's man pages, it accesses special pages located in your $HOME/.mman/ (or $MMANDIR). It distinguishes each mmanpage also according to a section number and a name.

You can view your mmanpages with "mman mypage", and edit or create them using a simply "mman -e mypage". Those pages are meant to be in simple text format. But if you master nroff-man, you can use "mman -m mypage", and it will store a nroff-man version of the page. Feel free to use section numbers before the name of the command. Here you have its usage instructions:

usage: mman [-e|-m] [section] name
   -e   Edit a TEXT man page
   -m   Edit a troff -man man page

How do I use it?

I use the mmanpages to store explanations or examples of the parameters for certain commands I use often. For example, I have a mmanpage for mencoder, where I have examples of the parameters I usually use when encoding or filtering video. I'm tired of looking at very-big manpages in order to find always the same details I cannot memorize, and there came mman.

If you use clearcase, you may have a mmanpage called cl, with all the clearcase commands you need from time to time. The same about some sh syntax: how to write the case instruction? I had to look always at the manual for this. Now I have it in short in the mmanpage for sh.

Synchronization of mmanpages between computers

You can use a VCS as Mercurial, and keep a central repository where you update to and from. If you don't want any VCS, you can use unison.

Download and installation

Download the latest version (GPL licensed): mman - v1.0 (The manual is in the header of the file). It's a script in sh - don't look for any special filename extension. Put the downloaded mman in your path.

Author: LluĂ­s Batlle i Rossell, viric_at_vicerveza_dot_homeunix_dot_net