Re: Man page customization after 1.23?

[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2023 08 Jul 14:56 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Ronan,
> 
> At 2023-07-08T08:46:40+0000, Ronan Pigott wrote:
> > After updating to 1.23 I can no longer change the color of man pages
> > with LESS_TERMCAP_* vars.
> 
> Today I learned such a feature exists.  Despite Mark Nudelman having had
> up to 39 years to document it, apparently the only place the feature is
> described is on StackExchange.[1]

I suppose that since my finger always accidentally hits the 'd' key
instead of the 'r' key whenever I received those generous offers in
email to raise my page ranking via SEO (search engine optimization) you
weren't led here:

https://www.n0nb.us/blog/2020/02/tinkering-in-the-terminal-with-tput/

:-/  ;-)  :-D

Go about 3/4 the way down the page and there I show the settings I use
to unify the man page colors as closely as possible between the Linux
console and a given terminal emulator using the LESS_TERMCAP_*
variables.  It also has comment text that references the same link you
gave.

> Does any of this hold any promise, in your view?

Besides Ronan, and probably others in the future, I too will be
"affected" by this.  However, since I'm using Debian Stable, I have a
couple of years until Trixie is released with Groff 1.23.  I'll be
looking out for this change and also the deprecation of groffer which I
will be keeping a local copy of since I use it quite often.

Curiously, I didn't find a mention of LESS_TERMCAP_* on the Arch Linux
Wiki.  I did find a message in the Arch Linux forum that referenced
vimpager:

https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager
https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1723

Which is claimed to be capable of being used as a pager for man pages.
It doesn't seem to be in Debian so I may try it in an Arch VM or
manually on one of my Debian systems.

- Nate

-- 
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."
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