ManOpen v2.5.1 by Carl Lindberg November 2005

Please send any comments, suggestions or bug reports to
[email protected].

This program is provided ``AS IS'' and without any warranty.


ManOpen is a graphical interface for viewing Unix manual pages,

which are the standard documentation for Unix command line programs, programmer libraries, and other system information. It can open files directly or be given titles, in which case it will display the output from the "man" command-line program. An apropos interface is also provided, which is basically a quick-and-dirty search of the man page databases. Services are provided to other applications to open selected files/titles or do apropos searches using the selected text.

Version 2.5.1 changes:

- No longer declares 1, 2, 3, 4, ... , 9 file extensions as man pages.
  This caused problems on some systems.
- Page loading got slower under MacOS 10.4.2; this should be fixed.
- Handled some cases where UTF8 sequences appeared in the man page.
- Add support for the "n" man page section, (ab)used by Tcl for
  its man pages.

ManOpen can be useful for opening a man page without dropping

down to the command line, browsing and searching through long and complex man pages, or simply for printing them out.

Also included is an "openman" command line tool, which is similar

to "man" except it will display the man pages in ManOpen.app instead of directly to the terminal.

ManOpen should run on MacOS X 10.x, MacOS X Server 1.2, and

OPENSTEP/Mach machines. Source code is available. To install the app, put ManOpen.app in one of the standard Application directories, such as /Network/Applications, /Applications or ~/Applications. You may have to log out and back to have the services work.

To install the "openman" tool, put it in one of the directories in

the Unix $PATH, such as /usr/local/bin. Put its "openman.1" man page in a standard man page directory, such as /usr/local/man/man1. [Note that as of MacOS X 10.2, /usr/local/bin is not part of the default PATH. Adding "set path = (/usr/local/bin $path)" to your ~/.cshrc file is one way to set it back.]

For those who remember, there was a ManOpen 1.0 application

by Harald Schlangmann that ran on NEXTSTEP computers. This is a much updated version that adds many features. Thanks are due to Mr. Schlangmann for the inspiration, and his internal cat2rtf tool which is also used in this version.

Hope you find this useful,

-Carl Lindberg
[email protected]
[email protected]