Bat: Provide a man page

[jsamr]

Offer a linux manual page for utility description.

[0mp]

Also, it would be nice if it wasn't Linux-specific 😄

[sharkdp]

Sounds good. However, it feels to me that we are in a very early stage of development and command-line options are just starting to develop. So this does not feel very urgent to me.

[pickfire]

@sharkdp Would it be nice to have a troff man page or generate it from clap?

[sharkdp]

Would it be nice to have a troff man page or generate it from clap?

troff is what we also have for fd, correct? If so, I'd prefer the same format, yes.

Auto-generating the man page also sounds appealing because maintaining the man page for fd is quite cumbersome, to be honest. But generating via clap doesn't work yet, right?

[pickfire]

Oh, @sharkdp I was the one who contributed to fd man page, just remembered it. Haha

https://github.com/sharkdp/fd/commit/b6c95a48002b03ea31f32cedf8c1cb5ecb9e096f

Yes, auto man page generation is still in progress https://github.com/clap-rs/clap_generate/pull/1

[sharkdp]

@pickfire I know :smile: :+1:. What would you suggest for bat?

[pickfire]

@sharkdp If clap_generate have a auto man page generation, I definitely would suggest that. Right now if it was me, I would have wait for that support.

[kgilonne]

And please add "man" as subcommand of bat to open it 👍

[pickfire]

@kgilonne No, I would definitely not do that, now there's is already rustup man xxx which I think is useless, why not just add the rust man pages to MANPATH?

[sharkdp]

I also don't see the need for a man subcommand.

[sharkdp]

I have added a simple initial version in doc/bat.1 via help2man + some manual editing.

[sharkdp]

I am going to close this ticket. The next version of bat will ship with a man page. Any help in improving the man page is very much appreciated!