{"id":238,"date":"2006-12-16T11:41:28","date_gmt":"2006-12-16T18:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/238\/one-small-step-for-a-man-page"},"modified":"2006-12-16T13:53:40","modified_gmt":"2006-12-16T20:53:40","slug":"one-small-step-for-a-man-page","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/238\/one-small-step-for-a-man-page","title":{"rendered":"One Small Step For A Man Page"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most of the time when I download some new piece of software, it&#8217;s mere seconds before I&#8217;m frothing at the mouth about some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/136\/insane-in-the-ui-brain\">interface<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/145\/another-ui-bites-the-dust\">usability<\/a> problem.<\/p>\n<p>\nWhich makes me sit up and take notice when a piece of software just does something damned elegantly, damned easily, and damned beautifully. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bruji.com\/bwana\/\">Bwana<\/a>, from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bruji.com\/\">Bruji<\/a>, is one of those pieces of software.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBwana is a UNIX man page reader. I&#8217;ve tried them before, and been underwhelmed. They try to take over hot keys on my system, or leave some UI application running all the time. I&#8217;m not <em>that into<\/em> man pages. What Bwana does is brilliant: it uses your web browser as the interface to beautifully formatted HTML renditions of your system&#8217;s man pages. I just type, for instance, &#8220;man:diskutil&#8221;. Since I&#8217;m always running a web browser, it doesn&#8217;t hurt anything to have it suddenly able to show me man pages. And the pages look fantastic.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nEven better, it&#8217;s been recently made open source. So I guess I can fix my only complaint, that a &#8220;not found&#8221; man page doesn&#8217;t automatically bring up a list of substring matches.<\/p>\n<p>\n<strong>Update:<\/strong> I decided to go ahead and implement these changes. Download my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/downloads\/Bwana-DCJ.zip\">modified sources<\/a> for a version of Bwana that, when it doesn&#8217;t find an exact match, presents a filtered index of man pages whose names contain the substring.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nNice work, Bruji.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of the time when I download some new piece of software, it&#8217;s mere seconds before I&#8217;m frothing at the mouth about some interface or usability problem. Which makes me sit up and take notice when a piece of software just does something damned elegantly, damned easily, and damned beautifully. Bwana, from Bruji, is one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,23,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-software-reviews","category-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}