man page editor for text screen [closed]

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Do you know any editor for man(1) pages which work on text screen (terminal and console)? Searching the interned did not gave any useful results as the words are very common.

Or should I learn the details of the format and write it by hand?

Answer 1

You can write it e.g. in markdown then convert it via e.g. pandoc to manpage format ((t|g)roff). Here is the fine manual: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html .

HTH

Answer 2

Sure, go ahead and learn the format and write it by hand in a regular text editor.

On the other hand, the perl project uses a kind of universal markup called pod and then converts into manpages by running pod2man.

Answer 3

Man pages are written in plain text with a simple markup language called troff.

Actually there are several related markup systems all supported by a set of commands ending in roff: nroff, troff, and the all singing, all dancing super-set groff.

My Mac OS 10.5 systems has a nice summary of the history in man 7 roff.

As others have noted there are several tools around which can convert other markup formats to man pages.

Answer 4

The easiest way is to write content as "reStructuredText" (simpler than wiki syntax) and use docutils to generate manpage from it.

See this tutorial.