I often have browser and terminal windows open side by side on my desktop. With this set-up, when unsure of a command I’m about to use in the terminal, it’s handy to be able to load its man page in the browser.
You can use mankier.com for this, but what if you want to view your local copies, not online versions? Here are a few ways to do just that...
man -H
The man(1) command itself can generate an HTML
version of a man page and load it into your browser, using the
-H option. For example:
$ man
-Hfirefox man
will load the man page for the man command in Firefox:
Konqueror
KDE’s
Konqueror browser
handles man pages natively, so using that you can just type something
link man:rsync in the URL bar:
Konqueror uses man2html(1) under the hood.
dwww
On a Debian-based system, the
dwww package lets
you search for, browse, and view man pages on your system. Once
installed:
$ sudo apt-get install dwww
point your browser to:
http://localhost/dwww/
Note: dwww uses Apache’s HTTP server by default, so make sure that’s
running.
