For those of us who still occasionally find their way to the command shell, we sometimes have the need to look up commands and their parameters. Sure, the Unix “man” command is right there at our fingertips, but it’s not always great for looking up stuff in-line between commands. Man Viewer is a little helper application which makes it easy to look up one or multiple commands quickly and easily in separate windows. It can also generate PDF files formatted for readability.

Notes:

  • Man Viewer requires the ‘groff‘ command to work. You can install it via Homebrew here.
  • ‘View PDF’ used to work with macOS Preview (the generated file is actually a PostScript file). Since macOS Ventura, you’ll need a separate viewer app for such files, such as FileViewer.
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