Comments on: Tutorial: How to Color Man Pages & How It Works

By: gregzeng

gregzeng — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 06:45:45 +0000

Though the white-majority of Australia put me in prison for 6-years, I’m a (PROUDLY !!) colored-man, but not optically color-blind. Back on topic, …

Color-blind people might prefer other color combinations. Your alternative coloring, we cannot see, unless we do it ourself.

Older people like myself are used to black text on whitish background. Some computer programmers allow for us dinosaurs. What are the codes for oldies like us?

Chief Information Officer, Retired (medical, 1984)
Australian Capital Territory

By: satish

satish — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:13:12 +0000

Nice tutorial with good explanation. Thanks for sharing it.

By: Craciun Dan

Craciun Dan — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:42:36 +0000

Thank you for sharing the way ‘most’ works. It seems like a good alternative, however it isn’t installed by default on my distribution.

By: Morvan

Morvan — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:17:50 +0000

Good morning.

Nice work, Craciun Dan.

As depicted by Eman, a simple ‘export PAGER=”most”’ did the trick, with “Most” installed, of course.
Besides this, you can treat of “mostsh” lines in a file called .mostrc – this file will be scanned by MOST program.
My .mostc, as a tiny example, contains this:

export PAGER=”most”
color normal brightcyan black
color status white blue
color underline brightgreen black
color overstrike yellow black
…

Your care with explanation (did be dessication?) of what code does is technically flawless. Is that way we can help people to learn and like code.
Write ever for all us.

Morvan, User Linux #433640.

:-)

By: Craciun Dan

Craciun Dan — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:17:36 +0000

Thank you! :)

By: Craciun Dan

Craciun Dan — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:41:52 +0000

OK I’m glad we cleared that out :) Thanks for the kind words, it’s nice to see it helps.

By: John

John — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:41:25 +0000

Excellent article, thanks! Very well explained, and fantastic level of English as a second language.

I note that no one was actually offended by your title, it was only a fear of offending that made you change it. I wish the PC crowd in the US would not export their hangups and shortcomings to the rest of the world! But I digress…

Looking forward to more articles of the same quality!

Cheers!

By: Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:13:44 +0000

Craciun Dan — That’s fine, and you could also go with “Coloring Man Pages . . . ” or something like that. Like Anon says, it’s a great tutorial and I’d hate to see the attention be drawn away from its goodness by the title.

Again, keep up the great work.

By: Dean

Dean — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:32:31 +0000

So just put “Man pages” as “Manpages” and everyone will be happy & fine.

By: Craciun Dan

Craciun Dan — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:31:00 +0000

I changed the title, and I hope it is OK now. I believe it sounded a little weird, hopefully now all discussions not related to the content will be avoided. I’m not from the U.S., nor from an English-speaking country (Romania, anyone? :) Please tell me if this is appropriate or if I should change it again.

By: anon

anon — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:00:15 +0000

Dan:
It’s a nice article, thanks for writing it.

Even if unintended, the title can definitely be misconstrued. While it’s unfortunate that first reactions are associated with the racial interpretation, which obviously you do not mean based on the context of the article and an understanding of what a ‘man page’ is, you may consider weighing whether or not a very simple title change is a reasonable price to pay for not having all of the comment conversation detracting from the actual, excellent content of the article.

By: Craciun Dan

Craciun Dan — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:08:51 +0000

Thanks, however there isn’t any connotation intended.

By: Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:36:48 +0000

Hey, Dan –

This is an excellent tutorial — thanks for writing it.

I don’t want to sound picky, but you might want to reconsider the title for it. I don’t know where in the world you might be, but “Colored Man” has racial overtones in the United States and elsewhere (like South Africa, too, where there’s also a history of racial segregation), and can be construed by the more “politically correct” crowd as racist.

I know what you mean by “Colored Man pages” and I’d be willing to bet you’re not a racist. As a newspaper editor for about 30 years, I come up against headlines like this all the time (“Police help dog bite victim,” or “Headless body found in topless bar”) and they’re always just gaffes to laugh about later. But I thought I’d give you heads-up on this.

Keep up the great work.