The penchant for contemporary software today to rely on cloud services becomes a malady whenever said services fail. The recent Google Cloud Platform failure two weeks ago was just one such event whose impact was widespread. By no means is this a novel thing as computer historians would rightfully attest. Complex, changing systems will inevitably fail. Sadly, much of the software in production today is not designed to fail gracefully.

Because the web, an overwhelming amount of computer documentation (reference manuals, user guides, tutorials, etc.) is now read from the Internet. This is great until it’s not. Software that packages documentation “local-first” relaxes having to be on-line to read it. So it is with Emacs and Unix-based systems with Man pages.

Observing the above, I announce two more Transient menus for Casual, one for the Unix Man page reader and the other for the built-in Emacs Help system.

By and large these menus are for navigation features but delving into both Man-mode and help-mode, I’ve come across some TILs:

• Setting the variable Man-switches to the value “-a” will display all the man pages for a specified topic.
  • This is useful if you have multiple variants of the same utility installed. An example is ls where one variant could be GNU and the other BSD.
• In Man-mode, if the point is on another command with a man page, pressing RET (man-follow) will open its man page in another window, regardless if it is a link.
• From help-mode, the commands help-goto-info (binding ’i’) and help-goto-lispref-info (binding ’I’, Elisp only) will send you to an Info manual on the current help topic if it is available. (the missing link!)

For Man-mode, I’ve taken the liberty of making an occur-style command using a regexp that looks for a ’-’ or ’+’ command line option. It is bound to ’o’ in the menu casual-man-tmenu.

Both Casual Man & Help are part of the Casual v2.6.0 release on MELPA.

Links

Some earlier posts related to Emacs documentation:

• nfdn: Announcing Casual Info
• nfdn: Personalizing Emacs Doc Navigation

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