View Manpages With More Color Using Bat
The default pager (program for display large text documents) for manpages is
less. That is, when I run something like man git-log, I am starting a less
process for viewing that document and I have access to all the features and
keybindings of less.
A comparable alternative to less is bat
which support manpage-specific syntax highlighting. With the -p flag, bat
uses plain styling which removes the extra formatting. With the -l flag I
can set the language for syntax highlighting to man.
❯ MANPAGER="bat -plman" man git-log
That's a nice way to experiment with using bat as the man pager, but if I want
it set longterm I should add that env var setting for MANPAGER to my shell
config or dotfiles.
While bat is an improvement with the color that it sprinkles in, I am going to
stick with neovim as my configured manpage viewer. Neovim gives me a
similar level of color plus a lot of other really nice features that only an
editor could provide.