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======================================================================
TkMan is a graphical, hypertext manual page and Texinfo browser for
UNIX. TkMan boasts hypertext links, (optional) outline view of pages
with a novel information visualization mechanism called Notemarks,
high quality display and unique interface to Texinfo documents, full
text search among man pages, incremental and regular expression search
within pages, robust yellow highlight annotations, a shortcut/hot
list, lists of all pages in user configurable volumes, a comprehensive
Preferences panel, man page versioning support, and unmatched online
text formatting and display quality, among many other features.
See screen dumps of
<a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/tcltk/pix/tkman.gif">manual page</a>
<a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/tcltk/pix/tkman-texi.gif">Texinfo</a>
browsing.
Compatible with Sun Solaris, SunOS, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, Digital UNIX
aka OSF/1, DEC Ultrix, AT&T System V, SGI IRIX, Linux, SCO, IBM AIX,
FreeBSD, BSDI
"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
TkMan offers many major advantages over man and xman: hypertext links
to other man pages (click on a word in the text which corresponds to a
man page, and you jump there), and better navigation within long man
pages with searches (both incremental and regular expression) and
direct jumps to sections of a page. TkMan also offers some convenience
features, like a user-configurable list of commonly used man pages, a
one-click printout, and integration of `apropos'.
The Texinfo browser takes a very different approach than any other GNU
info brower, and thereby is able to provide a number of advantages not
usually possible. (1) TkMan's browser works from the Texinfo source,
as opposed to form that has been formatted for character terminal
displays, and therefore can and does provide much better looking text,
in multiple fonts (proportionally-spaced for body text, typewriter for
computer text, bold and italics, blue hyperlinks for crossreferences,
and even cedilla and a lowered E in TeX. (2) An outlining interface
continuously gives overview and context to navigation within the
document, as opposed to the system of nodes with only immediate
neighbors known, which, at least for me, very quickly leads to being
"lost in info-space". All this costs only disk space of 2% over the
original source files, which may be compressed.
Further, one may highlight, as if with a yellow marker, arbitrary
passages of text in man pages and subsequently jump directly to these
passages by selecting an identifying excerpt from a pulldown menu.
(Highlights are robust across changes to page content and movement of
the file.) Pages are given an outlining user interface whereby the
text of a section can be collapsed or expanded underneath its header,
independently of other sections. Within otherwise collapsed sections,
a variety of Notemarks(TM) can appear. Notemarks are excerpts from
the text showing highlighted text, command-line options, search
results, or the first line of each paragraph in that section, and
shown in context with section headers and other Notemarks.
Functioning as a note, a Notemark may itself communicate sufficient
information; functioning as a bookmark, it can be clicked on to
automatically expand the corresponding section and scroll to that
point. Notemarks provide numerous immediately available hooks into
long texts to expedite identification of a desired passage.
Other features include:
* full text search of man pages (with Glimpse; optional)
* individualized directory-to-volume mappings
* if an old version of the page is available under RCS,
optionally show differences: additions as italics, deletions
as overstrike, changes as bold italics. It would be interesting
if someone created RCS files for Tcl/Tk since Tcl 1.0.
It takes a little work to set up, but try it out.
* when multiple pages match the search name, a pulldown list of all matches
* regular expression searches for manual page names
* man page name completion
* Fuzzy search for man page names if not exact match found
(e.g., "srcolbzart" finds "scrollbar")
* list of recently added or changed manual pages
* "history" list of recently visited pages
* user-configurable "shortcuts" or "hot" list
* preferences panel to control fonts, colors, and other system settings
* compatibility with compressed pages (both source and formatted)
* diagnostics on your manual page installation
* elision of those unsightly page headers and footers,
* and, when asking to print a page available only in formatted form,
reverse compilation into [tn]roff source, which can then be reformatted
as good-looking PostScript
Among the NEW features in fast and funky version 2.0 are:
* Outlining user interface, with Notemarks (optional)
* high quality GNU Texinfo file reader (optional)
* Show page version differences, if RCS archive exists
* Database kept in memory. Startup takes about EIGHT SECONDS;
searches and volume displays are faster.
Users of previous versions can delete the ~/.tkmandatabase* file.
* Man page name completion
* Fuzzy search for man page names if not exact match found
* Highlights follow man page as file moved/update with new release of software
Optionally, highlights can remain visible in otherwise collapsed outlines
to serve as "in-place bookmarks"
* Helper script "retkman" that can be used to restart TkMan after
changes to the MANPATH in a shell, either manually or as a side effect
of a modules management system.
* Takes advantage of Tcl/Tk 8.0
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