About ManKier

ManKier is a collection of man pages, translated from the their original troff to semantic HTML5.

Why Use It?

ManKier tries to make reading and man pages as convenient as possible.

Man page sections and subsections are outlined in a dynamic side-menu. You can tell what section you’re in at a glance, quickly jump between sections, or even share a link directly to a section, for instance check out the grep “Repetition” subsection. (If you’re on mobile, tap the hamburger button after clicking the link to see the outline.)

Command options are links, so if you're looking at a synopsis or example, you can click any of the options to see what it does. For instance, try clicking any of the options in ssh’s “Synopsis” section.

Press “s” to search on any man page, with autocomplete. Searches starting with a dash (“-”) will help you jump to option definitions on the same page, anything else will search for other commands’ pages.

TL;DR sections are injected into man pages, thanks to tldr.sh. A nice example is this quick reference for the less command.

ManKier can be registered as a search engine in your browser. Set its keyword shortcut to “man”, so you can type “man grep” in your URL bar to go straight to the grep man page. Or even “man grep -e” to go straight to information about grep’s -e option. (Instructions for Firefox and Google Chrome). Or if you use DuckDuckGo, try the !mankier bang.

Extras

Man page stats for the pages hosted on ManKier.

If you have a complex command and aren't sure what it does, ManKier can help explain the programs and options. Just paste the command on /explain, e.g.: du -s * | sort -n | tail. Also, thanks to ManKier's API, explain commands in your shell with a bash function or an NPM module.

Explore man page connections, e.g. connections for docker.

Find out why man pages have numbers, and what they correspond to.

ManKier has an API: use it to search man pages, get information about them, and to explain whole commands.

Is there a man page this site is missing? Add it to the ManKier-extra repo.

Accessibility Statement

ManKier is fully conformant with WCAG 2.1 level AA. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers at jackson@mankier.com

What’s a Kier?

Kier Source: wikimedia commons “A large circular boiler or vat used in bleaching or scouring cotton fabric” according to Wikipedia.

A similarly brutal process is used to create HTML pages for this site from the original man page troff.

Contact: jackson@mankier.com