NAME

xman − X window system manual page display program. 

SYNOPSIS

xman [-options ...]

DESCRIPTION

Xman opens a small window on the display that contains the a menu of commands.  My hope is that this is small enough to allow you to call it in your .login and leave it running throughout your entire login session.  At this point in the program there several options; Help will pop up a window with on line help, Quit will exit, and Manual Page will pop up a window with a manual page browser in it, you may pop up more than one manual page browser window from a single execution of xman. 

For further information on using xman please read the online help information.  The rest of this manual page will dicsuss customization of xman to suit the needs of a particular user.  For groups that desire to create a new directory listing (manual section), read the section on the mandesc file that allows system wide customization of manual sections. 

Xman creates temporary files for all unformatted man pages and all apropos searches.  These files are stored in /tmp. 

OPTIONS

Xman is build upon the XToolkit (Xtk) and as such understands all default command line options of the Xtk. 

MANDESC

Xman will search each directory in the MANPATH for files to add to the directory listing.  xman also looks for a file called mandesc in each directory specified in the manpath.  The mandesc file tells xman to create a separate section for one or more of the directories in the manpath.  For example, if your manpath were ’/usr/man:/usr/sipb/man’ then xman would search /usr/man and finding no mandesc file would put all of its files in the default section names (e.g. manl gets a section name of local).  But it does find a mandesc file while searching /usr/sipb/man, this file contains the line ’lSIPB Programs’ (no quote marks) this tells xman to put all files in the ’manl’ section in a new directoy called ’SIPB Programs’.  Xman will search this file until there are no more lines of information.  This flexabilty is ideal for courses that have their own manual pages.  Like ’man’ xman searches only the following directories: man0, man1, man2, man3...  man8 ,manl (small L), mann.  Although it usually ignores the information in man0 unless there is a mandesc that specifically tells it not to. 

WIDGET AND RESOURCE NAMES

In order to change the default values for the widget resources you need to have the names, thus, below I have specified the names of some of the most common widgets. 

Top Menu                      - topBox. 
Help Window                   - help
Manual Page Display Window    - manualBrowser. 
Manual Page Command Popup Menu - xmanCommands. 
Manual Page Section Popup Menu - xmanSections. 
Manual Page Search Popup       - xmanSearch. 

In addition Xman has the following application resources:

manualFontNormal
manualFontBold
manualFontItalic
        The fonts to use for the three types of text in the
        manual pages.

directoryFontNormal
The font to use for the directory text.

bothShown
Either ’true’ or ’false’, specifiecs wether or not you want both the directory and the manual page shown at start up.

directoryHeight
The number of pixels hight the directory is when both it and the manual page are shown simultaniously.

topCursor
helpCursor
manpageCursor
searchEntryCursor
        The cursors to use in the top box, help window,
        manual page window, and search entry text widget
        respectivily.

helpFile
Use this rather than the system default helpfile.

topBox
Either ’true’ or ’false’, determines wether the top box (containing the help, quit and manual page buttons) or a manual page is put on the screen at start-up.

FILES

/usr/man/∗ or those specified in the MANPATH. 
mandesc

SEE ALSO

X(1), X(8C), man(1), apropos(1)

ENVIRONMENT

DISPLAY
to get the default host and display to use.

XENVIRONMENT
to get the name of the defaults file to load in.

MANPATH
to get the search path for manual pages.  Directories are separated by colons (e.g. /usr/man:/mit/kit/man:/foo/bar/man).

BUGS

The last button pressed in any of the popup menus stays highlighted, this is caused by toolkit problems with grabs and window leave events. 

AUTHORS

Copyright 1988 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
Chris Peterson, MIT Project Athena from the V10 version written by Barry Shein of Boston University.
 
 
 

September 29, 2021