Use xman for man page viewing under Apple's X11

Jul 04, '03 11:57:00AM

Contributed by: thinkyhead

xman is the standard X11 manual page (man page) reader program, and it comes with Apple's X11. You can run xman from Terminal, but it won't display man pages correctly. And if you add xman to the X11 Applications menu, nothing happens when you select it.

Before xman will work, there are a couple of environment variables that need to be set up. To add the necessary entries to your login shell, you need to edit the ~/.MacOSX -> environment.plist file, as described on this page at the Apple Developer website. The required entries are as follows:

The first entry tells xman where to find your man pages. The second entry tells xman to convert man pages (which are encoded in PostScript) into simple ASCII using groff before displaying them.

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