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Current behaviour

Example: x-man-page://8/fsck_cs is misinterpreted as an http:// URL.

Proposal

Allow x-man-page:// URLs to be hyperlinked —

Motivations

Appropriateness. Referring to an http:// or https:// URL for an online copy of the page may present a manual that is too new or too old for the user's system. Linking to an x-man-page:// URL will ensure that the page, read in OS X, is proper for the system.

Ease of use. The settings used by Terminal in response to these URLs are more immediately user-friendly than, say, entering man grep at the command line. Windows such as those below respond normally to the close box, to Command-W, down, up, page down and up keys, scrolling and so on:

a screenshot of Terminal using its Man Page settings for intro (1)

a shot of Terminal using its Man Page settings for mdfind (1)

Assumptions

It will be possible to enable this feature discretely, in apple.stackexchange.com areas alone

  • other stacks might be less welcoming of link protocols that are operating system-specific.

The reader will use OS X when following a link that is intended to open Terminal.app

  • for this reason, I chose Ask Different for this meta question.

Questions of a type that might include x-man-page:// URLs are not likely to be migrated to any stack other than Ask Different.

Risks

Without OS X, a reader may be confused by links that their system can not handle. Minimise this risk by use of plain english. With the shortening workaround suggested by Kyle, any one of the following examples might be plain enough:

Verbosity and gobbledy-gook. This exists in some man pages, not all. If a person will be daunted by the content of a page, then he or she might prefer to read that content in a web browser (solutions such as Bwana are given in answers elsewhere).

However: most such content relates to use of Terminal, so I argue that there's value in encouraging uses that can make Terminal less daunting. Reading a page that can be scrolled and closed with ease is one such use case.

References

http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/24351/8546

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

You could use a link shortener to link to the x-man-page URLs, like so:

x-man-page://8/fsck_cs

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Interesting, thanks, but the workaround fails in some browsers … – Graham Perrin Mar 31 '12 at 17:41
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@GrahamPerrin It works for me in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. What browsers does it not work in? – Kyle Cronin♦ Mar 31 '12 at 17:46
OmniWeb 5.11.1 (pictured‌​) treats is.gd/kP7w5a as a bad URL. In another environment, "the page's address isn't valid.". – Graham Perrin Apr 1 '12 at 9:49
up vote 4 down vote

All-in-all I like this idea, but I want to raise one point of concern. Generally speaking, a user who needs help accessing a man page has a high likelihood of being a user who will might be a little freaked out when clicking on a link opens a terminal session and causes pages (and pages and pages) of gobbledy-gook to appear. Discuss.

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Understood. Reference to a manual page alone (without Ask Different) is rarely a substitute for more explanatory help (within Ask Different). The intention here is to make the interface to the proper point of reference — when required — more user-friendly. Allowing OS X to use the predefined Man Page settings is a reasonably consistent approach to easing use of Terminal. Concerning the gook and the potential for freakiness, I'll edit the opening question … – Graham Perrin Apr 1 '12 at 14:25

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