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)? Searc开发者_如何学JAVAhing 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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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

See this tutorial.