Documentation reader?

[leyvi]

I'm tired of using less to read (among other things) the kernel documentation, and the contents of /usr/share/doc. What do you guys recommend?

[pingtoo]

I'm tired of using less to read (among other things) the kernel documentation, and the contents of /usr/share/doc. What do you guys recommend?

Does browser url: file:///usr/share/doc/ work for you?

[leyvi]

I'm tired of using less to read (among other things) the kernel documentation, and the contents of /usr/share/doc. What do you guys recommend?

Does browser url: file:///usr/share/doc/ work for you?

It does, but only for HTML. Thanks anyways, that's almost half of it.

[Hu]

$EDITOR, commonly vim or emacs, but most advanced editors should suffice.

[pingtoo]

I'm tired of using less to read (among other things) the kernel documentation, and the contents of /usr/share/doc. What do you guys recommend?

Does browser url: file:///usr/share/doc/ work for you?

It does, but only for HTML. Thanks anyways, that's almost half of it.

Is the document you want to view is some sort of structured text or binary? Browser should always able to load and display Text document (ASCII or UTF8).

I don't think there is a document reader that can read any kind of file

[wjb]

If kde, there's either khelpcenter, or with krunner it's just prefix with man: or info: e.g.

Code: Select all

man:ls

tkman if truly desperate (it's not pretty but it is gui)

and then there's what works reasonably well in most cases .... just google "man whatever" - you'll get a man file from somewhere, not exactly what you've got locally, but its usually fresh enough to do the job

[skellr]

Does browser url: file:///usr/share/doc/ work for you?

It does, but only for HTML. Thanks anyways, that's almost half of it.

I used to use Firefox for reading logs, it was just convenient to open it in a browser tab...

I think once you install xdg-utils it changes the file type hanling and Firefox would only want to download a .log text file instead of displaying it.

This is probably the place to look if you want to pursue the web browser approach.

https://portland.freedesktop.org/doc/xdg-mime.html


I can't help you with this. I chose the lazy option of not installing xdg-utils.

[leyvi]

There's this thing called Pandoc that can convert to/from most markup languages/formats. Would there be a way to tell Portage to generate HTML files from all installed documentation files matching a list of file types?

[flexibeast]

Off the top of my head, you could hook into the postinst phase; refer to /etc/portage/bashrc page on the wiki for details. (i hook into the postinst phase as part of providing desktop notifications of emerge progress.)

[flexibeast]

I don't think there is a document reader that can read any kind of file

Emacs can read and format a number of them out of the box (OOTB), though. For example, man page support is provided by "WoMan"; HTML support, by "EWW"; and to quote the "DocView" documentation:

DocView mode is a major mode for viewing DVI, PostScript (PS), PDF, OpenDocument, Microsoft Office, EPUB, CBZ, FB2, XPS and OXPS documents. It provides features such as slicing, zooming, and searching inside documents. It works by converting the document to a set of images using the gs (GhostScript) or pdfdraw/mutool draw (MuPDF) commands and other external tools, and then displays those converted images.

Of course, this has obvious limitations in terms of accessibility and ability to copy-and-paste.

For those that aren't supported OOTB, there are often packages (e.g. on MELPA) which provide such support. (And sometimes there are packages seeking to provide improved support compared to what's available OOTB.)

[leyvi]

Off the top of my head, you could hook into the postinst phase; refer to /etc/portage/bashrc page on the wiki for details. (i hook into the postinst phase as part of providing desktop notifications of emerge progress.)

Thanks, looks promising.