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manview.1
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1994-01-31
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MANVIEW(1) User commands MANVIEW(1)
NAME
manview - display manual pages using GEM windows
SYNOPSIS
manview { [section] pagename }
DESCRIPTION
Manview is used to view manual pages in a GEM-conforming
fashion. This is useful especially under a multitasking
environment. It is possible to view multiple manual pages
at the same time as well as using the usual cross references
easily.
As the program can be started with or without arguments, there
are two different behaviors for these cases:
If the program is started without arguments, a small dialog in
a window will show up, with the three buttons "Quit", "Hide",
"Manual Page". The "Quit" button terminates the complete program,
the "Manual Page" button opens an additional manual window, and
the "Hide" button - if enabled - removes this dialog; it is
enabled as long as at least one manual window is open and the
dialog is popped up after closing the last manual window. (See
the paragraph about environment variables to modify this
behavior)
If the program is started with arguments the dialog window is
not shown at all and will never show up. Instead a manual window
will be opened, showing the desired manual page if it could be
found (otherwise it will remain empty).
The manual windows contain each a menu and an area where the text
is to be shown. The menu bar has two menu items "Options" and
"Sections" and a status part, where the name of the current page
is displayed. The menu works only on demand, that means that it
has to be clicked upon to drop the menu down; after that it can
be used while holding down the mouse button or by releasing it
and selecting a menu item by clicking onto it.
In the "Sections" menu the current manual section can be chosen,
i.e. section 1 to see the user commands. If there is a selection
made the text area will show rows of names of all manual pages
found in that section with the possibility to choose one of them
with the mouse (if there are subsections like section 1m for
built-in mupfel commands, these are indicated behind the name of
the manual page).
The "Options" menu gives various possibilities: open new manual
windows, remove the current manual window, switch the display
mode between current manual page and current section listing
and search a specific manual page or search for a word in the
current one. It is also possible to quit the entire program via
menu or force a rescan of all the manual pages in case that some
of the used directory structures have changed (See paragraph
"Environment" for details).
For the search a dialog will show up where the searched item
can be entered. It has three buttons: "Cancel", "Keyword" and
"Global". The "Global" button is used for searching a manual
page, whereas the "Keyword" button is used to activate a
keyword search in the current manual page.
If manview detects at start time that there is already a copy
of itself running in the system, it sends a message to that copy
to display the manual pages given as arguments. (Of course this
feature can only work if there is a multitasking AES installed,
like Atari's MultiTOS.) Unfortunately, there are some older AES
system which do multitasking applications but do not provide the
necessary services for this feature. For users of these systems
an additional program named showman is provided, which does
basically the same, but also works under these older systems.
The manual windows have two different operation modes: one mode
displays a manual page, the second displays the complete listing
of all the manual pages of a given section. In this mode, a mouse
click on the name of a manual page loads this page and displays it
in this window (this feature has a more general background, see
the chapter about advanced mouse usage below).
ADVANCED MOUSE USAGE
All windows of manview can be operated while not being the top
window if the system's AES does allow that (this behavior can
be triggered with an environment variable, see below).
If manview is running on a system that provides a MultiTOS
compatible Drag & Drop protocoll, it is possible to drag an item
onto one of manview's windows and it is tried to find and load
the appropriate manual page; if the item is dragged onto the
dialog window, a new window is opened for that page. As a second
possibility for drag & drop some basic functions of the VA
protocoll are supplied.
Another feature is that if the user clicks onto a word in the
text area of such a window, manview tries to find and load an
appropriate manual page. If at the time of the click the ALT
key is pressed, the new manual page (if found) is displayed
in a new window.
KEYBOARD USAGE
Whenever a button in a dialog (in a window or not does not
matter) has an underlined character, it is possible to
operate this button by pressing this character while holding
down the ALT key.
There are keyboard shortcuts for some of the menu items:
control-f Search
control-d Display listing of current section
control-m Display current manual page
control-n Open an additional manual window
control-h,
control-u Close the current manual window
control-a Show some copying and version information
control-q Quit the program
There are several other keys supported:
control-w top the bottom window
up Scroll the window contents up
down Scroll downward
f, d, <space>,
shift-down Go one page down
b, u,
shift-up Go one page up
home Go to the top line
shift-home Go to the bottom line
control-g Continue a keyword search at the current
position with the same keyword
ARGUMENT LINE
Manview supports also command line arguments, which have to be
according to the following syntax:
manview { [section] pagename }
The support for section numbers is very useful if there are several
manual pages with the same name, which can happen very easily on a
file system that does not support case snesitive file names, like
the normal TOS file system, where 'fopen' and 'Fopen' are the same.
Example: manview 1 cookie 1m export 3 fopen
tries to display the manual pages cookie in section 1, export in
section 1m (a subsection of section 1) and fopen in section 3.
ENVIRONMENT
Manview uses five environment variables:
MANPATH - this is the most important variable, as it controls
where the manual pages are searched. The paths are to be
separated by ',' or ';'. (The normal conventions for giving
drive numbers are supported: both c:\man and /dev/c/man
give the same result, folder man on drive c). Each of these
paths gives a folder, in which several other folders can be
found. For these, there are two possibilities: named cat*,
the folder contains manual pages which are already
translated into ascii format (with control characters) by
nroff(1). The other possibility is doc*, in which case the
folder contains manual pages in the 1st Word+ format.
The first character right after "cat" or "doc" denominates
the capter number of the manual page, i.e. cat1 and cat1m
both contain manuals in chapter one.
Example: export MANPATH=\usr\man,\usr\local\man
in \usr\man could be found:
cat1 manuals for user commands
cat2 manua